We Need to Talk About Utilitarianism

Although there is some debate in universities over different approaches to ethics, the fact is that those of us living in developed societies have been steeped in utilitarianism all our lives and this has been the case for generations. Utilitarian ideas have dominated the moral landscape since the late 19th Century. And utilitarianism was developed by the early liberals. Utilitarianism is the moral philosophy of socio-economic liberalism. Economic liberals believe that trade will maximise utility without any help and thus morality in the abstract. They just want to do business and remove barriers to doing business (and this tells us who they are). Social liberals believe that societies must intervene and take action to ensure maximised utility and tend to have a more concrete and pragmatic approach. Liberals are not interested in equality of outcome, although social liberals pursue equality of opportunity. Economic liberals are ready to abdicate all decisions to the marketplace and financial necessity (including problems like global warming).

When I set out to describe liberalism, I noted that in its time it was a radical and progressive response to centuries of unquestioned absolutist rule. Tyranny, not just over the body, but also over the mind. Thomas Hobbes was a 17th Century transitional figure in that he raised questions about when citizens owe allegiance to a king. Soon, however, John Locke was asserting that liberty was innate in a person and not something that a king or slaver could grant, they could only take it away. However, it is important to keep in mind that classical liberals were all willing to take liberty away from some classes of people. John Locke argued for enslaving prisoners of war and for the expropriation of land and resources from first nation Americans. J. S. Mill campaigned for women's suffrage, but also for continued British rule in India. Thomas Jefferson argued against slavery but personally owned hundreds of slaves throughout his life.

However flawed the early articulators may have been, the concept of individual liberty took hold and fired up revolutionary fervor in France and the USA. It also captured the imaginations of the British intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie created by the Industrial Revolution. This, in turn, led to the assertion of individual liberty as a social, moral, and legal principle. At first, this really only applied to the elite: women, for example, were initially excluded enmasse along with people of colour.  Indeed, the only group that were seen as capable of exercising liberty were landowners, the very people who (literally) enslaved and exploited everyone else. Gradually, a new breed of liberal emerged that wanted to universalise liberty and to use the apparatus of the state to help individuals achieve liberty where it had been denied to them. New or social liberalism happened earlier in the UK than in the USA where exclusionary classical liberalism was and is a much greater force.

The central irony, then, of classical liberalism was its espousal of individual liberty, while denying liberty to whole classes of people. The neoclassical liberals, the ones who espouse an extreme form of economic liberalism, have that same exclusionary mindset. They are not quite the same as libertarians whose attitude is every man for himself. Rather, the economic liberals seek to appropriate and consolidate wealth and power, which they rationalise with a combination of twisted Darwinism and utilitarianism.

Having pulled down the idols of absolutist rule by priests and kings, however, created a whole new set of problems. This essay is about the liberal response to this change and why liberalism goes about it all wrong.

The Better Angels Argument
 

There will be readers already wanting to argue, along the same lines as Steven Pinker, that liberalism has in fact been very successful: people have more prosperity, freedom, and peace than ever before. I've already made the point that there is liberalism and liberalism. Classical liberalism created a vast amount of wealth but distributed it very unevenly. They moved a predominantly agrarian workforce into urban/manufacturing jobs, and thence into service industries, but job security and working conditions peaked in the 1970s. Since then uncertainty has crept back into work in the richest countries. There has been a decline in overall poverty, but this is largely because the elite are  exporting jobs to poor countries and grooming the world's poor to be the consumers of tomorrow.

It is doubtful that consumerism really does improve anyone's life. The major long term cost of consumerism is climate and ecological breakdown. No matter the positive impact that modern economic liberalism has had, it is about to be wiped out by climate change. We are already seeing the rise in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, both droughts and floods. We really don't know what is going to happen as we continue to heat the earth's atmosphere, but we can safely say that it won't been good for the majority of humanity (or non-human species). We are also seeing a collapse in the flying (i.e. pollinating) insect population across Europe. Economic liberalism is not the better angel of our nature. In all likelihood it has killed us via pollution, extreme weather, sea-level rise, and mass extinction.

The ideas at the heart of liberalism, especially "reason" and "self-interest" have led us to existential crises of unimaginable scope and scale. In retrospect our behaviour has been irrational and suicidal.

Yes, of course, classical liberalism has promoted trade between nations making war less likely. Pinker is right about that. But the staggering cost of this is now apparent. Even in the short term, government has been captured by wealthy special interest groups. Based on research they helped to fund, oil companies are redesigning their offshore rigs to cope with massive sea level rise, while at the same time lobbying governments to prevent effective responses to climate change by undermining the credibility of that same science. Worse, we have been fooled this way before, by Big Tobacco, who took the same approach in the mid-20th Century. But also by Big Finance leading up to the 2008 global financial crisis. The "big lie" is a term coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf (1925) to explain how Germany became Europe's whipping boy. Hitler's idea was developed as an active PR strategy by his PR advisor Joseph Goebbels. And now for Big Business, and politicians the big lie is part of their stock in trade.

It is social liberalism, rather than economic liberalism that has done more for expanding enfranchisement, reducing slavery, objecting to wars, and generally making people free. And which is (belatedly) coming around to trying to prevent and mitigate climate and ecological breakdown.


Political Divisions

Social and economic liberals are to some extent at odds over the role of the state in society. Economic liberals want to minimise the scope and power of the state to allow for business people to make unrestricted profits. Social liberals are willing to accept a larger scope for the state in order to give the poor a hand up (note this is not a hand out). It is this last point that distinguishes social liberals from socialists.

A social liberal wants the individual to prosper. They see that systems sometimes place barriers in the way of individuals and are willing to use the power of the state to level the playing field. Classic responses to systemic inequality are state funded and standardised education. But even education is tailored to finding a job and being a productive member of society. For liberals, the ideal is the self-made person, especially if they have come from humble beginnings. Someone who worked hard and overcame obstacles to become a success in material terms. It's no coincidence that the American Dream is couched in these terms.

Socialists, by contrast, do not see progress in terms of the progress of individuals. Progress is really only progress if everyone benefits equally. Socialists want not (only) equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome. They are more inclined to solve inequality by actively redistributing wealth towards the poor and using the state apparatus to inhibit wealth accumulation. The socialist ideal is more about making a contribution towards the flourishing of the nation, helping people who cannot help themselves.

Despite the ongoing use of the terms, modern politics is not about left-wing and right-wing any more. It is about the clash between economic (classical) liberals and social (new) liberals, i.e., between the right and the centre-right. Actual socialists are rare in Europe these days and absent in the USA. President Trump is centre-right in his economic policies (trade barriers to "protect" American workers are a classic social liberal policy). But he is strongly authoritarian, nationalistic, and racist, which is falsely attributed to the far right, but is in fact independent of the left/right access.

Utilitarianism encapsulates some of the ideals of liberalism, mostly classical/economic liberalism. It prioritises the individual and undervalues context, particularly the social nature of humanity. Utilitarianism was framed by the mercantile class and thus expresses the ideals of economic liberalism as though they are self-evident truths. Like liberalism, it was formulated by members of the educated elite who were (unconsciously) seeking justification for their behaviour on the world stage, i.e. brutal and rapacious empire.

How did we get to this point?

The Collapse of Idols

One of the most important roles of the ancient kings and prophets was as law givers and moral arbiters: The Code of Hammurabi, the Laws of Moses, the Dharma of Manu, the Annalects of Confucius, and dozens of others. And one of the recurring anxieties of history (down to the present) is that in the absence of obedience to such laws human beings would simply run amok. In the Western tradition this anxiety is manifested in Thomas Hobbes' highly influential book Leviathan. As I noted (On Liberty and Liberalism), Hobbes lived through a time of war and socio-political turmoil and as a result described the natural state of people as war. Hobbes' opinion that the life of man in the absence of a tyrant to rule over them was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". As a result he argued that only a strong authoritarian leader (the eponymous Leviathan) could impose order and civility on us.

Unfortunately, this view became quite widespread amongst Enlightenment intellectuals. They saw themselves as a uniquely civilised elite surrounded by a sea of barbarians (the rest of us). They probably read too much idealised Roman history and utopian fiction. They seem also to have been infected with a secular version of the "God's chosen people" myth. In particular, the classical liberals saw themselves as having risen above the hoi polloi. They saw themselves as establishing a new kind of rational social order, with themselves at the apex, that would displace the hereditary aristocracy and the Church.

However, they also saw themselves as facing exactly the same problems: how to protect the wealth and justify the power gained through exploitation; how to subdue and control the barbarians outside the gates and avoid the fate of the Roman Empire. The minds of the elite have been obsessed with this ever since. So on one hand they were wrestling with the problem of the collapse of traditional authority and on the other they were very much interested in taking over, exploiting, and expanding that authority. All they needed was some kind of justification that the masses would accept.

The New Idols

One of the products of the early successes of the Enlightenment was hubris. Natural philosophers or scientists as they came to be known, promoted the idea that the universe was a gigantic complex mechanism and that everything could be understood. At this point they did not know that the visible stars are part of a galaxy, or that it was one of approximately two trillion such galaxies, or that all the galaxies are flying apart at an accelerating rate. They were only just starting to get clues that matter could be divided and subdivided into very much smaller units.

The mechanistic universe followed predictable patterns and was governed by simple laws: F=ma, V=IR, 2H₂+O₂→2H₂O and so on. French philosopher Auguste Comte envisaged an anthropocentric hierarchy of such laws. Physical laws would govern matter at the lowest scale and give rise to chemistry. Chemical laws would govern biology. Biological laws would govern the functions of minds, and laws of the mind would govern how societies function. This idea was taken up and developed by none other than J. S. Mill, hero of Liberalism and also one of the first generation of Emergentists. Mill was the first to describe matter as having emergent properties.

The idea here is that the world is governed by natural laws. And the key feature of such laws is that they don't require human intervention; they are universal, impersonal, and follow logical patterns that can be apprehended through the use of reason. Anyone can discover the natural laws for themselves, though in the myth only the elite had the required education and intelligence (women were still excluded from the elite). These laws became the new idols, and those who could discover them the new priests. The Copernican revolution was accompanied by a social revolution.

Many of the natural laws we take for granted were discovered by the classical liberals and their friends. The individual who could discern the law was at the heart of this new idolatry; he was Nietzsche's übermensch. Various threads of modernist thought exploited the new emerging dynamic giving rise to some new archetypes, or at least new manifestations of the what Nietzsche called Apollonian and Dionysian archetype. Most obviously "the scientist" discerns laws through observing nature and applying reason and logic; and "the artist" lives in contact with nature and discerns deeper truths through paying attention to their own subjectivity and through self-expression. Even the protestant plays the game, observing a personal relationship with god and allowing that to guide their actions. Of course, Luthor predates Hobbes by about 150 years, but arguably the loosening of the mental shackles imposed by the Catholic Church opened the way to other changes that loosened the shackles imposed by kings; and thus to the deposing of both.

We are not all as pessimistic as Hobbes. Still, being social animals, humans intuit that their lives must be governed by someone and many believe that they could be that person. Replacing the all powerful law givers with the idea of natural laws was a genuine breakthrough. Potentially, it shifted the power and authority to an abstract, but still natural, third party outside the group. In the early days, it seemed that natural laws would resolve all of our differences and conflicts. Heady stuff.

Of course this was hubris and it did not pan out as the Enlightenment figures hoped it would. There are limits to knowledge, some of which may turn out to be absolute. And the natural laws that might govern our lives, the social analogues of the formulas of physics and chemistry never really emerged. The increasing complexity inherent in the hierarchy of sciences meant that the Enlightenment project floundered and was eventually rejigged into modern science with its emphasis on uncertainty, and statistics, and our ongoing failure to understand quantum mechanics or to reconcile QM with relativity. The early promise of materialism faltered and it fell by the wayside.

What did happen was a swindle: the ideology of liberalism was passed off as a natural law.

With the classical liberal ideas of the individual (i.e. the individual, wealthy, educated, white man) as the chosen one of the new order and their individual liberty (from the oppression of the masses) as the sine qua non, came the emergence of a new form of morality, i.e., the Utilitarianism of J. S. Mill and Adam Smith. The pursuit of happiness was enshrined in the US constitution as a fundamental right, though it took some time until they abolish slavery and longer still to enfranchise women and the descendents of former slaves. Utilitarianism is framed in universal terms, but its founders still saw humanity in Hobbesian terms (i.e., in need of a good tyrant). In particular, the expansion of European imperialism shifted the narrative from a God-given right to rule over man and beast towards naturalistic arguments about survival of the fittest and the lack of fitness of some people to rule over themselves.

Rational Self-interest

If you hold individual liberty to be an inalienable right and also that there are almost no justifications for infringing that right (as did Locke and Mill), then there is really only one viable moral arbiter: each individual must decide for themselves how to behave. This is protestantism reductio ad absurdum. But when human nature is vicious, aggressive, and acquisitive something ought to stand in the way of one human simply killing another and taking their stuff.

The early liberals believed that men, and more especially educated white men like themselves, were in a position to rise above (Hobbesian) human nature through the use of reason and become their own moral arbiters. They partly did this by sending boys to private schools where education in the classics combined with beatings, humiliation, and peer pressure either shaped them into members of the elite or broke them. This is still the preferred route for the children of the elite, though methods have changed somewhat. Private school boys (and now girls) subtly learn that they are better than the masses and destined to be a limb of the modern polypod Leviathan, i.e., the State. Heads of the UK state are once again old Etonians as they were before social liberalism opened the door to common people like Margaret Thatcher.

As we have seen, the early liberals adhered to a view of reason as:

"a specific conscious mental process by which we apply logic to problems and arrive at knowledge of the truth, which then guides our decisions." (We Need to Talk About Reason)

If a citizen could be persuaded by reasoned arguments to follow some basically civilising prohibitions on barbaric behaviour (like murder and stealing), then there was really no need for anyone else to get involved. Lawful citizens ought to be free to go about their lawful business (the word "business" in this cliche is no accident). But this reveals another problem created by the destruction of the pre-modern idols. In religion there is a point to being obedient, i.e., salvation. If salvation is off the table, what is the motivation for being lawful?

In moving away from the lists of banned or taboo actions typical of religious morality, utilitarian liberals had a problem. What was the point of behaving yourself? Their fixation on the individual strictly limited the possible answers to this question. In the end, the best they could come up with was the lame idea that being good led to happiness.

“Happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct” (J. S. Mill. Utilitarianism, X: 237).

For any individual, a moral life will consist of maximising happy outcomes; while for a society, morality becomes the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This is known as the greatest happiness principle. It is just as banal as it sounds. I'm sure most people think happiness is important, even if we do not agree that it is the "sole end" of human action. The founding fathers of America placed the pursuit of happiness alongside life and liberty as fundamental rights that all men have. But what exactly is happiness? In general, and against the grain of millennia of religious thinking, utilitarians argued that happiness is pleasure.

You know you are in the twilight zone when people who argue that humans are rational and make rational decisions at the same time argue that the sole end of human activity is an emotion and that the promotion of an emotion is the test of whether our rational decisions have been a success.

Any fan of Star Trek (original series) can see this contradiction in the character of Commander Spock, who consistently denies having any emotions although, because he is half human, he sometimes does display emotions to his acute embarrassment. The obvious question is raised from time to time. Why does Spock show preferences at all? It is, he claims, because it is logical. But what kind of logic is he talking about? Deductive? Inductive? Abductive? How can these guide us to, say, a moral decision? Doesn't it all depend on what we believe in the first place. And as Michael Taft says, "a belief is an emotion about an idea." Of course the TV show plays on the contradictions in Spock. His colleagues are constantly catching him out expressing and relying on emotions and teasing him about it. At which point he always becomes visibly annoyed. Another emotion. Later Star Trek writers took the idea of an emotionless man ever further in the form of Commander Data (who was more obviously crippled by his lack of emotions). But let us return to the main theme of utilitarianism.

Jeremy Bentham stated the happiness = pleasure argument quite crudely but, starting with J. S. Mill, utilitarians have refined the idea. Mill, for example, argued that mere quantity of pleasure it stimulated could not account for the goodness of an action. Indeed, Bentham's theory sounds like a justification of hedonism rather than a moral doctrine. Mill introduced a dimension of the quality of pleasure, arguing that some pleasures are better than others. In a sense Mill was just reflecting the elitism of his day which allowed the refined hedonism of the ruling classes, but frowned on and repressed the simple pleasures of the working classes. This class discrimination persists in the UK despite the muddling of the classes. Middle class British people, especially, like to mock both the elite and the workers. They are our satirists, though they often seem to target (other) celebrities rather than politicians. They are educated enough to understand the exercise of power, but excluded from wielding it, and contemptuous of those who are compelled by it (including themselves).

In the manner of philosophers, some responded that if there is a distinction in the quality of the pleasure then it implies something other than pleasure is involved: some being for this other thing (whatever it was) and some being against it. And so on. Philosophers are trained to argue without any sense of needing to make a contribution to knowledge: the ultimate liberal art.

A central plank in the economic theory associated with classical liberalism, especially associated with Adam Smith and his interpreters, is that "markets" create an invisible hand that steers the economy. The market here is an abstraction from market places. The idea of the market is attractive because it is presented in the form of a natural law; one that can order our lives for us, maximising utility and thus happiness. Markets also ensure fairness (which is why Alan Greenspan was reluctant to prosecute white collar criminals in the finance industry).

Smith's idea of the market is based on a crude understanding of supply and demand, where supply and demand is presented as a "law" (it really is not a "law"). In this view humans only make rational, self-interested decisions; humans are motivated to maximise their utility (i.e. pleasure) through their participation in the economic system. In the myth of supply and demand, a producer responds to demand by making more or less of their product. The market informs the producer about the level of demand via the price that people are willing to pay. And knowing the price of a commodity is tacitly equated to sufficient knowledge to operate in the marketplace rationally. When the cost of production exceeds the price people are willing to pay, production will fall. None of which is true!

By the mid 1970s (at the latest) mathematicians had shown that supply and demand was not, and could not be, lawful in that simplistic sense. Supply and demand, even on the micro scale, does not work (the reasons for this are spelled out in detail in Steve Keen's book Debunking Economics). What is worse, in order to fit this micro idea to the macro economy, i.e. the economy of a state considered as a whole, economists have had to make a series of assumptions, each of which assumes that the previous assumption is true. A macro economy typically consists of thousands if not millions of producers and products, multiple levels of suppliers, and millions of consumers, and none of it following the idealised supply and demand law. In order to make the equations of macro-economics work, the economist assumes that an economy consists of one producer selling one product directly to one consumer.

Philosophy is Bunk

Let's cut short all this frivolous philosophising and call bullshit on utilitarianism. It might still dominate our society, but utilitarianism is not true. Not only have Buddhists been saying so for 2500 odd years but the Positive Psychology movement have confirmed it though empiricism: the pursuit of pleasure does not lead to happiness. And it is not hard to see why.

If I have one digestive biscuit with a cup of tea that is pleasant. A second biscuit may still be pleasurable, but if I keep eating at some point the same combination of texture and sweetness becomes unpleasant, no matter how much tea I wash it down with. It is quite possible to make oneself sick from eating too many biscuits: pleasure turns to nausea. Any addict will tell you that as you become accustomed to a certain level of stimulation it normalises. To get pleasure from it, you either need more of it or the same amount more often. As many experimental psychologists have attested, we rapidly become habituated to pleasurable sensations so that there is a diminishing return from the simple minded pursuit of pleasure. Even the more sophisticated hierarchies of pleasures are bunk.

But more than this, there is the existential truth that every experience ends, and usually quite quickly, because it is dependent on attention, and attention wanders. No matter how much you enjoy an orgasm, it is short lived and soon over and you are back to casting about for some other source of pleasure. The cessation of pleasure itself is unpleasant. If pleasure is happiness then no one can ever be truly happy.

It is difficult for a proponent of self-interest to formulate any coherent moral doctrine since morality is about how we treat other people. Anyone who treats other people only according to their own best interests would in practice be regarded as monstrous rather than moral. Societies very often shun selfish people. Morality is relational or it is meaningless. Even consequentialist or virtue ethics have to define what counts as good/bad in relation to some standard and that standard has to be relational.

Morality is Relational

Fortunately, we don't have to waste too much time on utilitarianism: the pursuit of pleasure makes us unhappy and the pursuit of self-interest makes both us and other people unhappy. At this point we could ask two questions: Firstly, is there a better definition of happiness that could rescue utilitarianism? Secondly, is there a better basis for morality. Ultimately, the answers these questions are "no" and "yes", but I think it's interesting to dwell on the first question a little and here Buddhism has a small contribution to make.

What makes us happy?

Assuming that a human being has food, water, and shelter, what makes us happy is the company of other humans (and some domesticated animals). This is far and away the most important facet of wellbeing. We are social animals and we are happy when we are securely embedded in our social group. In general, our well-being is promoted by sublimating our own needs to serve the group.

Primate social groups are not utopian, and especially they are not a socialist utopia. Primate groups are all hierarchical and all primate groups are violent compared to human groups. They are held together by empathy and a keen sense of reciprocity (including the fear of violent retribution), but there are also some individuals who are well liked, who form coalitions to dominate the group although usually in a narrow sense. An alpha male chimp has primacy when it comes to mating with receptive females, but not in much else. He's also expected to lead the charge against leopards, get involved in all intra-group conflicts (on the side of the weaker party), and has to spend much more of his time grooming other chimps than any member of the group.

Violence also plays a part in primate social hierarchies. Having members of the group who are big enough, strong enough, and aggressive enough to protect the group from predators like leopards, and who defend the territory in which they feed against neighbouring groups, requires social mechanisms to manage that capacity when it is not needed. And thus Frans de Waal has observed older male chimps intervening to prevent conflicts between others, defusing tension through physical contact and grooming. When things do get out of hand, the alpha male is often the one consoling the injured party and reintegrating them into the group. In Bonobos, females play the same role. Conflict cannot simply go on occuring because it breaks down the bonds that hold the group together and undermines the fitness of the group to survive.

So on one level what makes us happy is to be part of a healthy social group. Of course we are also individuals with individual goals. The anonymity afforded by living in groups of tens of thousands and even millions, gives us much more scope for individuality than living in a traditional village of ca. 150 people. We only share minimal mutual obligations with strangers and even if our actions are scrutinised there may be few consequences for transgressive behaviour compared to a more traditional small-scale setting. However, there is another answer to this question that we should consider.

Ego Dissolution

I cannot speak to this from personal experience, but there is a load of anecdote and an increasing amount of actual evidence that the experience of ego-dissolution opens up the possibility of a much deeper sense of satisfaction and well-being. Indian meditation techniques have been inducing ego-dissolution for millennia, as has the use of psychedelic drugs. Importantly, ego-dissolution is often accompanied by a greater sense of interconnectedness. It can be experienced, for example, as a weakening of the boundaries between one's body and the outside world; or as a sense of oneness; or of merging into a totality. How it is interpreted is partly determined by one's cultural conditioning.

Transcending the sense of being an individual seems to be a more satisfying state. Self-interest cannot have much meaning for someone who does not organise their experience around a sense of self.

There is an argument, still largely doctrinal, that it is the ego which seeks to take ownership of experience that causes unhappiness. Even a temporary experience of ego-dissolution opens up the possibility of being in the world without the grasping after experience that causes dissatisfaction. Ordinary experiences, not even pleasurable experiences, become more satisfying and effortlessly so.

However, it is doubtful whether ego dissolution is a realistic possibility for the general populace. The people having this shift in perception have always been a tiny minority.

The Angels of Our Nature

A new approach emerges from evolutionary perspectives on the ethology of social animals. I have written several long essays on this subject, beginning with The Evolution of Morality. This view argues that what we call morality is an emergent feature of the way social mammals, particularly social primates, live.

As Frans de Waal has noted, we share the same body plan and have all the same internal organs, including the endocrine system, as other mammals, so it would be weird if we did not experience the same emotions. Importantly, we seem to have at least two characteristics in common with other social mammals: the ability to experience empathy and a sense of reciprocity.

Empathy operates on many levels, the most basic of which is emotional contagion. When a monkey sees an approaching predators and gives a warning cry, the sound of the cry stimulates fear in the whole colony and sets them all in motion away from the threat. But at its most sophisticated level empathy allows us to use observations of the facial expressions, posture, and gestures of other group members to internally model—and thus experience—the internal states of other individuals. We do this with individuals that we interact with, but we can also understand interactions between other pairs or groups of individuals. We not only know the disposition of a given individual, but we know how they feel about different members of the group. This is vital for the functioning of the social group.

Reciprocity is the application of this ability to know the minds of the rest of our group to keeping track of the contributions the group have all made to each other. The levels of mutual grooming between individuals are important to chimps for example. If everyone sees Steve and Dave grooming each other a lot, then we can safely assume that the two of them will stick together in a fight. So if I want to pick a fight with Steve, I need to wait until Dave is otherwise engaged. But equally, if I'm angling to be alpha, then I know that if I groom one of the pair, the other might also join my coalition.

In my account of the evolutionary origins of morality, I argued that, far from being selfish, social mammals must err on the side of generosity. We can think of reciprocity as a network of feedback loops. I share with you and you share with me; I withhold from you and you withhold from me. If there is no bias towards generosity the second, negative feedback loop would quickly reduce cooperation to zero, whereas social mammals are highly prosocial and highly cooperative.

What's more, we also know from primate ethology and from anthropology that societies often punish selfishness. Jared Diamond recounts the story of a fisherman who one day decided that he wasn't going to share his catch. Not only did the community respond very negatively, he got a reputation for being stingy and this continued to affect him for a long time afterwards. Reputation with respect to meeting mutual obligations within a social group is very important. After all, we evolved to be prosocial in order to better survive.

This approach to morality comes under the heading deontology: it concerns right, duties, and obligations. Sometimes deontology is caricatured as "rule following", but this is an over-simplification. We can still think of morality in terms of consequences (as the utilitarians did) but we understand that desirable and undesirable consequences are relative to our mutual obligations. Similarly, this does not prevent us from seeing morality as a matter of virtues, as long as we understand a virtue is defined in terms of mutual obligations. Generosity is a common virtue, for example, and it is a virtue because it plays a vital role in creating and maintaining mutual obligations.

One might even argue that this view is also consistent with a particularist account of morality - i.e. one in which there are no moral rules and we take each situation as it comes. It is true of this deontological approach to morality that rules may not be easy to articulate or apply because our commitment to mutual obligation can vary from group member to group member. We tend to have one set of rules for family and another for more distant group members. In other primate groups, familial relations are also important, though like us one or other sex will often leave home at sexual maturity and join another community (male chimps and female bonobos).

Cities and Megacities

As I have already observed, the limitation of this account of morality as evolved and based on mutual obligation is that the bulk of human now live in urban settings in which we are surrounded by, and mainly interact with, strangers with who we may have little or no sense of mutual obligation. According to Robin Dunbar's research on social groups and neocortex-to-brain volume ratios there is a physical limit to how many relationships of mutual obligation we can keep track of. Chimps live in groups of 30 - 50 while, other things being equal, humans tend to live in groups of around 150. But we also form looser arrangements with ca 500, 1500, 5000, and so on.

In a group of up to 150 we have a pretty good idea of the overall structure of mutual obligations amongst the group: we know who are friends or enemies or lovers; who is related to whom and how; we know who to ask for help; and we know who is where in the social hierarchy. And so on. Beyond this we begin to take membership on trust. We rely more on external emblems of membership such as personal adornment; this allows us to expand our circle of trust that an individual will be likely to meet their obligation to us.

If I am from the large tribe who paint their faces with red ochre and I meet a stranger whose face is painted with red ochre I can assume that they will be likely to interpret mutual obligations in the same way that I do. I don't have to worry too much about a false flag operation, because we kill any outsider who attempts to adopt our emblems and we have subtle ways of assuring ourselves of the authenticity of membership (shibboleths). Mutual membership of a large tribe means we will probably speak the same language and have the same worldview. I can trust this person and make agreements with them with some assurance that they won't break the agreement. This is still a relatively small world. 

Beyond this, when dealing with strangers we don't automatically have a relationship of mutual obligations. One of the main functions of governments (of all stripes) is the enforcement of contracts between strangers. And this brings us back to the need for laws that govern our behaviour. We need laws to government behaviour but not because Hobbes was right and our natural state is war. Rather, we may say that, in social primates, mutual obligation is only strongly experienced within one's  social group at the 150 layer. 

In a modern state ,we grow up understanding that we have a mutual obligation to the state. We obey laws and pay our taxes and, in return, the state attempts to create an environment that is safe and stable, and the state provides certain services. Importantly, the state seeks to balance the rights and duties of players who have differing amounts of power to prevent the exploitation of the weak (this is the classic alpha-primate role): So the state legislates the rights and duties of buyer and seller, landlord and tenant, employer and employee, and so on. Each state may have a different take on these rights and duties and they may change over time, but the role is the same. 

Philosophers like to use the fact that laws and conventions vary in different societies and states to argue against seeing morality in a unified way. Arguments for moral relativism are not tenable when we look at the structure and function of laws. Yes, to some extent laws are arbitrary and changeable, but they always serve the same functions within the society. It is a classic case of emergent properties in which the higher level (human society) is constrained by not determined by the lower level (primate ethology). By analogy, just because there are many different types of boat, does not mean that boats don't float. 

However, we may say that, under utilitarianism as an expression of economic liberalism and mercantilism, the rights of the rich and powerful tend to be protected ahead of the poor and vulnerable. I am still sometimes shocked at the difference in presumptions in New Zealand where I grew up, and in the United Kingdom where I live. The presumption in favour of landlords and employers, for example, is much stronger in the UK. Although to be fair, under the influence of neoliberalism this balance shifted in my time in New Zealand as well.

One of the features of the modern world is that morality is linked to socio-economic status in the minds of the ruling classes. To be wealthy is held to indicate superior moral qualities and, on the contrary, to be poor or without work is to be considered morally inferior. These days accepting state assistance when out of work requires that one almost becomes a ward of the state. The state undertakes to oversee your redemption in the form of returning to productive work. And to do this it uses a mixture of rewards, punishments, and psychological "nudges", including a barrage of press releases from government departments on the moral qualities of those individuals who accept state help. This is social liberalism in operation: paternalistically trying to make you into an ideal individual. 

Conclusion

Utilitarianism is ubiquitous as a moral theory across the English-speaking world. And yet the assumptions behind it are demonstrably false, the goals of it known to be unreachable, and the methods it proposes do not lead to the stated goals. Utilitarianism was supposedly the Enlightenment rationalism contribution to moral theory but it turns out to be completely irrational.

It's not that at some point people abandoned irrational religion and dedicated their lives to rational pursuits. As we've seen, the classical notion of reason that the moral theorising of Bentham, Mill, and Smith was based on was a fantasy. Many intellectuals did abandon religion, and atheism is now the standard position for English speaking intelligentsia, but there is nothing rational about the beliefs that they now profess with respect to morality. This is nowhere more apparent than in a BBC radio 4 programme called The Moral Maze in which the same group of opinionated neoclassical liberal intellectuals argue with invited guests about the "morality" of some situation. Moral principles are never articulated, but utilitarianism is assumed through out. The panellists adopt a position of superiority to their (often expert) guests and devise arguments against everything that is said. No wonder morality becomes a maze for the rest of us.

Etiquette

One problem is that not all social rules are moral rules. As Sangharakshita pointed out many years ago, for example, most of the rules in the Theravāda Vinaya have no moral significance at all and are merely a matter of etiquette. In her book, Watching the English, anthropologist, Kate Fox, described the complex rules for queuing to buy a drink in an English pub. These are significantly different from queuing in other contexts. Generally speaking the English take queuing very seriously so doing it wrong can result in verbally expressed disapproval. Such mutually agreed rules of conduct—etiquette—both help to establish reasonable expectations and to identify strangers. One of the reasons we may be stressed by immigrants is that they don't--they have not internalised our etiquette (as an immigrant I still struggle with this and cause stress for the locals, sometimes with a certain amount of delight on my part).

Why do we separate out moral rules and etiquette? Well, largely because of religion. Moral rules are those which relate to soteriology. Since atheists have abandoned the notion of soteriology, why have we not abandoned discussion of morals? Why do some decisions have moral connotations and others not. Why, for example, does editing a child's genome using the CRISPR/Cas9 technology seem to be a moral issue, but using food to calm a child down (leading to obesity and the attendant health problems) not seem to be? One is a matter of public debate and the other a matter of personal choice. Again I think answers to such questions can be found in primate ethology. There seem to be rules of human conduct that are non-arbitrary and ubiquitous across human groups (such as killing a member of the group) some that are arbitrary and vary with limit. And I think the deciding factor is the effect on the overall health of the group.


Alternatives?

The question, then, is whether there is any alternative to the moral maze created by treating liberalism in its various forms as a natural law and to utilitarianism as one expression of this. Or does this inevitably lead to objectionable moral relativism? I've hinted that I believe that primate ethology and a structuralist approach offer us some relief. In this view, despite the plethora of human societies each with its own rules, we can see the purpose of having such rules as being shared at some level of structure. As long as the rules accomplish the deeper purpose of binding the group and enabling cooperation it does not matter what form those rules take at a higher level of organisation. Indeed, to some extent the forms that human societies take are constrained by our underlying membership of the set of social primates. And these constraints have some objective basis, i.e. empathy and reciprocity. 

In my next essay in this "We need to talk about" series, I'm going to revisit this whole topic from the point of view of objective morality. It is often said that science cannot tell us how to behave, but I think this is now self-evidently inaccurate. Science, particularly the kind of Darwinian evolution articulated by Lynn Margulis, has been very influential on how I see morality, as has the primate ethology of Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal. Science disproves the validity of utilitarianism as a good basis for morality. Evolution and ethology have opened up a whole new way of thinking about what morality is, how we evolved to be moral, and what forms morality can or should take in human societies at different levels of organisation (as well as informing us as to the nature of those levels).

~~oOo~~

See also: Cooperation with high status individuals may increase one's own status https://phys.org/news/2019-08-cooperation-high-status-individuals.html

"The finding that status depends on cooperation provides insight into why human societies, particularly small-scale societies like the Tsimane, are relatively egalitarian compared to other primates," says von Rueden, joint lead author of the study. "Humans allocate status based on the benefits we can provide to others, often more than on the costs we can inflict. This is in part because humans evolved greater interdependence, relying on each other for learning skills, producing food, engaging in mutual defense and raising offspring."

Against Karma: Modern Buddhism

This is the concluding part of a long essay making a Buddhist case against traditional karma views. Part 1, Against Karma, set the scene by reiterating some points I've made before about karma and the just world fallacy. Part 2, Against Karma: Suffering and Justice, explored the role of suffering in the just world fallacy. In this part, I conclude with some very incomplete ideas about how we make a good society, a summary of the main points, and some concluding remarks.

In my view, no suffering is ever deserved. It might be a direct result of some evil or ignorant action, but still, I have experienced a great deal of suffering and I don't think anyone deserves it. Moreover, I don't believe that it helps people to be more moral in the first place, or the that moral debts are satisfactorily repaid by the infliction of suffering (and nor does anyone else, since criminals are always treated with prejudice). I cannot think of any circumstances in which inflicting suffering is justified. I don't see any suffering as "earned".

And I don't say this as a saint. I have harmed people in the past and probably will again. Sometimes I have set out to do harm. But I am ready to admit that I was wrong to do so. I do believe that it is immoral to harm others or, indeed, to harm any sentient being, or the environment, generally. I have made a lifelong commitment to doing better and recognise the need for constant work in this area. Part of my reason for being in a Buddhist Order is to make common cause with people who feel the same way (although this has gotten complicated lately). 

Minimising harm is the urgent task of every human on the planet. I think most of us get it, but we define our group narrowly and only apply the principle locally. We need to expand our sense of identity to take in a broader picture. But there may be limits to how far some people can go with this. Nationalism as a response to insecurity and high levels of immigration is no great surprise. It may well be that globalisation is a good thing, but the reactions we are seeing to it suggest that, at best, it has been poorly managed. The UK going through the self-mutilation of Brexit is a sign that something has gone very wrong with the post WWII European project. But I don't see any sign of soul-searching going on.

I do not believe in karma because I do not believe that suffering restores justice; all suffering is unjust and there is no just world to balance it out. We can certainly cause ourselves to suffer, but I cannot see that any greater purpose is served by this. Fairness and justice, to the extent they exist at all, are emergent properties of human social interactions.

Of course, most people still think in terms of in-groups and hierarchies of exclusion; they put a higher or lower value on the lives of others depending on how closely related that they are. This is unlikely to stop because we evolved for it. We are social, hierarchical primates, and have an intuitive sense of what works (whether it does or not). But we are also capable of transcending our biological and social conditioning. And here modern Buddhism offers us some very useful tools for pursuing a better life: mindfulness, devotion, critical thinking, scepticism, positive emotion, meditation, and community.

I emphasise modern Buddhism because in order to continue to refine Buddhism we have to change it. I would say that we have to root out the presupposition that some suffering is deserved. We have to align what we say to what we do: we are interventionists in the world with the aim of reducing suffering. So let's not espouse doctrines that say "it will all work out in the afterlife" because that is counterproductive. Our approach is far more dynamic than this: we believe that we must take urgent action, whether or not we are enlightened, to reduce harm and increase well being. That's why we have public centres and teach meditation and Buddhism (though I think we do the latter all wrong).

And, above all, we have to communicate our ideas and values to other people in ways that will motivate to move in the same direction. Not necessarily to join our community, but to help form a confederation of smaller, loosely aligned communities which aim to reduce suffering. We have more in common with Amnesty International or Greenpeace than we do with Christianity or Islam (which is partly why I am bored by comparative religion). On the other hand, the folks who go out on cold winter nights offering hot tea and sandwiches to the homeless tend to be Christians rather than Buddhists. Anyone who is acting to reduce suffering is on the side I want to be on. The Triratna movement in India is more of a social movement with religious features and there is our model - the poor and downtrodden empowered to uplift themselves through education, equality, and fraternity.

Sometimes people are determined to make others suffer or are indifferent to their suffering. And we need a moral code that explains when and how we can intervene and what kinds of steps we can take. And counter-intuitively this may include inflicting harm. A policeman who shoots dead a suicide bomber before they can set off their explosive to kill and maim many others has clearly done the right thing and we need to adopt a moral code which can handle this situation. We also need to have ways of preventing, say, a capitalist who makes excessive profit at the expense of the security and safety of workers. We must see to it that everyone is housed, clothed, and fed. Work need not grind anyone into the ground for minimum wage. Industry must not harm the air we breath, the water we drink, or the soil we grow our food in! None of this is rocket science. We mainly just need to consider empathy and reciprocity.

If we want members of our society to behave themselves and contribute then we have to make it worth their while. The fact that some members of society chose lives of crime, instead, tells us that we are not making law abiding attractive enough. If obeying the law is oppressive or leads to unequal hardship, then we should expect a lot of law breaking.

In the west we tend to be quite hard hearted about the law. There is no obvious reward for being law abiding, it's just the minimum we expect. However, we set society up so that there is inequality and some people can't get by, even if they are working. If there is reciprocity then law abiding citizens need to know that they are going to be looked after as recompense for keeping to the rules.

So let's give people incentives. For example, housing should always be cheap - speculators should not be allowed to force up the cost of housing. One household, one house: no companies, no foreign investors, just people living in houses. Of course it has to be viable, so the housing can't be free. But in the UK landlords who rent houses can afford to pay 10% of the rent to a company to manage it for them and it is still one of the most profitable investments. We could just decide, no: houses are for people to live in.

The amount of wealth in the world is easily enough to provide for the needs of every living person. Easily. We need not have poverty or hunger. All it takes is for people to change their minds about who is deserving of what.

Our views about fairness, justice, and the role of suffering are just beliefs. "Belief is an emotion about an idea" (Michael Taft). If we feel differently, then our beliefs can change. Usually, it takes a personal connection to change someone's mind. Just bombarding people with facts is not enough.

In Part 2 of this essay I made the point that work is less secure nowadays and that this creates anxiety. To illustrate how we think about things, many people feel aggrieved that the government gives out-of-work people money. They may believe that such payments are undeserved. They may cite an example of someone who typifies this undeserving person or they may just believe what the media says: that the unemployed are lazy and feckless (repeating a 600 year old lie).

Most of the unemployed people I have met in many years of being unemployed want to work; they feel anxious about not being able to provide for their family, the insecurity of handouts, and the stigma of unemployment. They are bored from having nothing to do. I think one has to connect with them on a human level. It is all too easy to demonise people based on superficial judgements. But we know what this looks like writ large because we had the 20th Century. If we don't treat people as people it makes us less human, and on a societal scale can be monstrous: e.g., the British Empire.

Of course, ideally, the state would provide meaningful work and pay high wages for shit jobs to make them more attractive. Lately, government has decided to stay out of providing work and shit jobs offer shit pay. Should the person who carts off your dirty garbage in all weather be paid 10% of the salary of the manager who sits at a desk all day pushing (clean) paper around or 1000%? Who is more essential? What about the people who teach your kids at school and university or who care for you in a hospital? Why are they paid poorly compared to chief executives? Hint: the reason that CEOs are well paid is that they get more work for lower pay from fewer people, thus maximising shareholder returns. It just so happens that the people who make employment laws are all major shareholders in companies, often because they inherited their money. 

Key points

Where "we" is humans in general,

1. We are social and hierarchical primates
2. We evolved empathy and reciprocity
3. Morality emerged from the obligations and expectations created by 1. and 2.
4. Fairness is an appropriate response to obligations and expectations
5. Justice is the restoration of a situation of fairness
6. We tolerate what would otherwise be called bad behaviour in response to unfairness, because
7. We believe "suffering creates justice".
8. We perceive ourselves as having different obligations to and expectations of ingroup and outgroup people
9. Our definition of ingroup can be very flexible and expansive, if we feel secure
10. Most cultures see immorality as creating a debt and
11. Moral debts are paid in suffering and thus
12. Suffering is in some sense earned or deserved and restores fairness and is just
13. But there is evident injustice and undeserved suffering, so
14. Religions invoke the afterlife as the place where one suffers in order to restore justice.
15. Belief is an emotion about an idea, and both can change through personal connections. 

Conclusions

In traditional Buddhism the idea that suffering is deserved is encapsulated in the doctrine of karma. The doctrine says that present suffering is a result of past actions (with some debate as to the extent of this). It also says that our future experience is dependent on our present mental states. Buddhism demonises emotions since these are what lead, ultimately, to suffering (except in Tantra where they turned this on its head and embrace emotions).

By contrast, I believe that no suffering is earned or deserved. Even those who cause themselves harm through being misguided or careless don't deserve to suffer, because their suffering does not make things fair. It's not fair that mistakes or ignorance cause suffering, but more suffering does not improve the situation in any way. There is no justice in the mistaken or ignorant person suffering because of their mistake or lack of knowledge. Sometimes pain will help us learn to avoid the action that caused us pain, but if the route to learning is blocked then again, that is not fair or just.

The idea of a just world is pernicious because it inevitably blames humans for everything that goes wrong, when the fact is that sometimes shit just happens and no one understands why. There is no fairness and justice apart from how we treat each other. It's nothing to do with abstract principles or the supernatural.

Further, I believe that emotions, including so called negative emotions, are natural and helpful. Anger and fear protect us. Desire gets us our basic necessities. Love bonds us to the people who help keep us alive. And so on. Demonising these is unhelpful, but so is the idolisation of them in Romanticism. Emotions are just states of physiological arousal mediated by the autonomic nervous system in response to certain types of stimuli which can be internal (e.g., hunger) or external (i.e., a predator). They are typically accompanied by a style of thinking that gives the emotion its special flavour. Arousal plus happy thoughts is joy whereas arousal plus fearful thoughts is anxiety; and so on. Still, I can't help thinking that if we allowed ourselves to experience emotions more and theorised about them less we'd be better off.

I believe that some of us are able to have a radical transformation of perception so that it is not so self-referential. But not all of us. For most people life is never going to involve that radical transformation so there is no point in selling it as a panacea to all ills or as something everyone can attain. I suspect more people could attain it than current do, but the world is not fair so most people don't have the opportunity. Also, the techniques required are still embedded in contexts which make them inaccessible to the majority - i.e., in religions that require people to take on beliefs and obligations that are unattractive to the majority.

Karma as it is taught by Buddhists is a false picture of the world that clouds the issue and makes the possibility of radical transformation considerably less accessible. Traditional Buddhism ignores the way things really are in favour of a fantasy that is fundamentally unfair and unjust. As modern Buddhists, we could do something about this by exemplifying the change we seek and by telling new stories about the way things are in 2019. Which personal liberation is desirable, modern Buddhism needs to be politically engaged and seeking change on a societal level to make life better for everyone. I'm a fan of the various Green New Deal initiatives. The idea is taking hold in the US amongst progressives, but dates back to a group convened in the UK in 2007.

Mind you, as I watch the politics of the English-speaking world descend into a morass of pettiness and stupidity, I cannot help but wonder if we have left it a little too late to pay attention to the bigger issues.

I don't doubt that traditional Buddhism, complete with monks pretending that they live in medieval India or Tibet, will continue to be a draw card. And modern Buddhism will always have a relationship with the tradition. But this modern-tradition distinction is, to some extent, false. All Buddhism practiced today is modern, it's just that some Buddhists are convinced that pretending to represent some earlier phase of Buddhism makes them more authentic. And, of course, with monks a lot of it is tied up with issues of identity and status. It might be better to use distinctions like conservative and progressive; or authoritarian and libertarian.

I suppose if pressed I would say that I am a green libertarian socialist Buddhist, not an anarchist or a communist, but in favour of mutual aid between willing participants in society and an economy which rewards industry and innovation. Also in favour of a government that puts people and the environment first ahead of profit and that redistributes wealth fairly. Some profit is fair enough, just don't forget who adds the value to the raw materials through their labour! Basically, I grew up in New Zealand in 60s and 70s and there was a lot about it that was good.

But more than this. Look at any movie in which a group of people are threatened by some external force. All humans succeed by having two advantages: individuals with great ideas, and groups of people who work together to make their ideas a reality. We need both and to reward both. Buddhism, no less than society, or all of humanity, fighting off an alien invasion! One of my favourite thinkers, René Jules Dubos, said "Think globally, act locally". I might add, "think individually, act in concert."

~~oOo~~

Against Karma: Suffering and Justice

The central issue of Buddhism is dukkha, variously translated as suffering, dissatisfaction, misery, stress, etc. Dukkha and its antonym (sukkha) are used in subtly different ways in different contexts. For example, Sue Hamilton (2001) has shown, in one sense dukkha is synonymous with unenlightened experience. That is to say that we don't have an experience that is qualified by the presence or absence of dukkha, rather unenlightened experience itself is dukkha. The first noble truth is just this: that sense experience does not satisfy our longings (whatever they are). The second noble truth informs us that the unsatisfactory nature of experience has an origin (samudaya) and that this origin is our own craving for it (taṇha). The pursuit of experience is not the way to happiness.

On the other hand, in the context of vedanā, experience can also be parsed as sukha or dukkha, meaning here, "agreeable" and "disagreeable". Finally, sukha and dukkha can be metonyms for nibbāna and saṃsāra. As we find in Dhammapada 203:

jighacchāparamā rogā, saṅkāraparamā dukhā;* etaṃ ñatvā yathābhūtaṃ, nibbānaṃ paramaṃ sukhaṃ.

Hunger is the worst disease, Constructs are the worst misery; Knowing this, just as it is, Extinction is the greatest happiness.

*note that dukkhā is spelled dukhā to fit the metre of the verse.

There is a presupposition in the Buddhist discussion of suffering. It is, of course, a self-evident fact that there is suffering. This is not something special that only Buddhists have noticed. More generally the problem of evil (or the question of why there is suffering) has been discussed by humans for as long as we have been capable of abstract thought. There is suffering. And it has a cause. That cause is us, i.e., we cause our own suffering. This is not unique to Buddhism, either. The Christian myth of the Garden of Eden blames humans for their suffering; they could not follow a simple prohibition and thus their God turned against them. In that story, the only responsible adult present is Yahweh. If anyone should be punished, it's him. In our myths, humans like to blame ourselves for our own suffering. 

I know that some people are horrified by the suggestion that Buddhists are "blaming the victim". I am certainly in that camp. But what I'm getting at is that "we cause our own suffering" is a presupposition of the received Buddhist tradition. I'm not endorsing this view, I'm stating it as baldly and as simply as possible in order to get to an important point. It raises questions I will try to address in a later essay. Why did we evolve in such a way as to consistently cause ourselves misery? 

Let's soften it a little and restate the idea in a slightly more subtle way: Buddhists believe that (at least some, if not all) suffering is the natural outcome of conscious choices we make. Karma is the theory that the suffering we experience is inevitable, appropriate, and timely. The idea is that if we could anticipate the consequences we would not act. And since it is our own mental states that determine the outcome, we can introspect before any action and exercise restraint to prevent any bad consequences.

On one hand, rebirth is the main consequence of karma and we end rebirth by not doing karma. On the other hand, we keep doing actions (with rebirth as consequence) until we purify our minds of evil intent through religious exercises. As Richard Gombrich has shown (2009), Jains had the first half of this equation but indiscriminately saw all actions as contributing to rebirth. Brahmins had the second half but equated karma (and escape from rebirth) with correct performance of rituals. Buddhism combines them to make a new hybrid religion. By equating karma with intention (cetanā) and characterising it as good or evil, Buddhists counteracted the worst aspects of Jainism (extreme austerities, lack of discernment with respect to good and evil actions). And by making the individual's willed actions the focus they disrupted the priestly hegemony and expensive rituals of Brahmanism. The key feature of Buddhism, unlike other Indian religions, is that it does not treat the cessation of sense experience in religious exercises as absolute being (jīva, ātman, brahman, puriṣa, etc). However, the explanation of this new syncretic religion proved to be very difficult. The early iterations were deprecated because of inconsistencies. But none of the later iterations quite managed to be fully consistent, either. At worst, Buddhism is solipsistic sophistry; the worst being Nāgārjuna and his "nothing goes" approach.

Coming back to the focus on suffering, most Buddhists seem to go further and argue that this reaction of action and consequence is what Buddhist justice looks like. Broadly speaking, karma is what supplies the "just" in just world or the "moral" in the moral universe. In other words, the suffering that we experience is only what we would expect in a just world. It is just what happens when our previous life was ruled by greed and hatred, even though we don't have any strong connection to that life (no memories that would enable us to conceptually connect consequence to action). We have to presume that our suffering is appropriate, which leaves some of us wondering what kind of monster we were in our last life to deserve this one. 

To distil the idea down its essence: suffering is the instrument of justice. 

Again, this is not peculiar to Buddhism. This is the presupposition behind all just world myths. The just world is just because bad behaviour leads to suffering (eventually). In Buddhism, an evil action [miraculously] produces suffering; a good action [miraculously] produces pleasure. More specifically, an evil life is [miraculously] rewarded with rebirth in a world of suffering; a good life is [miraculously] rewarded with rebirth in a world of pleasure. A saintly or holy life is [miraculously] rewarded with the end of rebirth so as to preclude any future suffering. Somehow, the universe just delivers the right result, at the right time, to the right person, every time.

This is sometimes written about as though it is like a law of nature. The thing with laws of nature is that they have to be consistent with all the other laws of nature. A "law of nature" that involves supernatural forces or entities, is not a law of nature. It's a miracle. Karma is a miracle, not a law of nature. Indeed, it doesn't even fit with other Buddhist stories about the world, let alone with laws of nature. This brings us to a feature of knowledge seeking in the ancient world: analogical reasoning.

Argument from Analogy

Many of the arguments for this view that suffering is the instrument of justice take the form of analogies. A classic Buddhist analogy is that allowing yourself to be angry is like picking up a lump of burning coal to fling at your enemy. We understand this analogy. Few of us get to adulthood without a few minor burns. Burns are very painful, partly because we have special nerves for burning pain. Signals from pain nerves are turned into subjective burning sensations by our brain. So we all know and understand burning sensations. The analogy is saying that when acting from anger we create the conditions for our own future suffering in the same way that taking hold of hot coal burns us. 

With all arguments from analogy, we need to pause and consider how apt they really are. Metaphorically, anger burns. When we feel angry, we get red-faced, steamed-up, hot-tempered; we burn with rage, erupt, boil over,  scald, etc. And if this happens it can easily tip over into violence, if only into violent words. Physiologically, anger activates our evolved autonomic arousal response to a threat and helps us on the fight side of the fight-or-flight-or-freeze triangle of threat responses. Anger might just put off a threatening predator or competitor because they know they will have to fight us. Anger makes us look scary. As a precursor to violence, anger warns aggressors that they risk injury. Anger marshals our physiological resources to defend ourselves and our loved ones from danger. 

As a species, we are highly attuned to reciprocity. If someone is angry with me and threatens violence (all anger is a threat of violence) then I reciprocate with my own fight-flight-freeze response either to warn the assailant that it's not worth their while to fight me, or to better enable me to escape, or to avoid detection (depending on which path I take). And note that violence need not amount to the loss of self-control. Sometimes violence is very deliberate and directed. Whether physically or psychologically, we set out to hurt and we do it in the most direct way we can think of. 

With burns there's a feedback loop; the pain of being burned rapidly teaches us to avoid flames and hot things. We learn how to test for heat before picking up potentially hot items. The same is not true for anger because we evolved to get angry whenever we are threatened as part of our suite of survival mechanisms. Anger marshals the body's resources for life or death action. Metaphors aside, the feedback is different from experiencing burning pain. 

If I go around just being angry all the time, then people will want to fight me or avoid me. However, for this to happen I'd have to both perceive myself to be under threat and my social group not working to provide me with safety and security. So anyone who is angry all the time is already in a dysfunctional situation. The anger is not a cause of suffering; it is a symptom that results from the situation. This is not the same as being burned by a flame at all. Acting from anger is nothing like picking up a burning coal to fling at your enemy. Of course, it can rebound on us, but that very much depends on who the anger is directed at. If my group and I get angry at someone who is trying to hurt us and we work together to drive them off, then we are not harmed by that. We are protected and brought closer together.

All analogies have their limitations. This analogy which sounds OK at face value is, on closer inspection, simply false. In fact, behaviour is very much influenced by environment and social convention and is much less about individual psychology. Disruptive behaviour is like pain. It tells the community that something is wrong, that some vital need is going unmet.

Security

In 2018 there was a spate of knife injuries in London and many people have been expressing opinions about what bad people these criminals must be. No one is asking the obvious question: why do young men in some parts of London suddenly feel insecure enough that they would start carrying a knife. Anyone carrying a weapon is much more likely to be injured or die. Just a few years ago stabbings were significantly less common. We also know that, in stark contrast to my days at university in the 1980s, that today's students are demanding that the institutions protect them by not inviting provocative speakers and not allowing challenging topics in lectures. Well-heeled university students don't resort to carrying knives, but they also feel less secure than teenagers did two generations ago. What has changed in the environment to make young people feel less secure? 

One thing is that work is much less secure than it was a generation ago. Work pays less in comparison to costs - the cost of housing has increased outrageously. Work is often on a fixed term contract or a zero hours contract (where you have to work if offered hours, but no work is guaranteed). Over my working life employers have radically reduced the quality of working life, the rewards for loyalty, and the ability of workers to make common cause to demand better treatment. Working conditions have steadily eroded as a result of Neoliberals seeing the cost of labour as an overhead that soaks up profits. And they see profits as rightfully belonging to shareholders. In the UK many people working full-time don't earn enough to live on.

The solution has been to offer state handouts rather than reforming wages. At the same time, the government is pursuing a low taxation fiscal policy; more tax money is being spent propping up high rents because the market-driven alternative would be thousands of homeless families. No one thinks this is a reason to revisit the policy of allowing foreign speculators to force up the price of homes at 5-10 times the rate of inflation or the policy that allows businesses to pay wages below a subsistence level. This can only be perceived as a threat to life by those who work for a living. It might not be an acute threat, but it is a chronic threat. Children may not be working, but they live in families affected by the insecurity of work and wages.

Add the threat of internal terrorism and external war, combined with economic threats (massive indebtedness of nations and business sectors) and yes, the average citizen feels less secure than they did. If they pay attention then they may feel less secure for other reasons also, such as climate change or pollution.

Social problems have social causes and require social remedies. The idea that an individual is responsible for everything that happens in their life is just bunk. Individualism is an idea that allows the rich and powerful to justify abdicating from their obligations to society at the same time as exploiting people and common resources for their own profit. Individualism makes the poor and oppressed much weaker and leaves them with little or no access to common resources. And it leaves the middle feeling constantly insecure about what they have. Individualism, the cult of the individual, is one of the most pernicious ideas ever entertained by humanity. We evolved to live in groups.

Why should individual suffering be highlighted? In a situation where a person's very thoughts and choices are (at least partly, but likely mainly) determined by their social environment, why should the focus of a just world theory be on individual psychology? That is not fair. Of course, every now and then some bright spark can rise above their circumstances and shine as a star. Think of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, born an untouchable outcaste but died with a PhD from the London School of Economics and having helped to write the modern Indian constitution! But look at the vast majority of his people, the Mahar caste, and they are still downtrodden, still oppressed, and still poor today. And in fact, even Ambedkar was given opportunities because of the British Army's policy of recruiting Dalits and because of a wealthy Sikh man who wanted to eradicate caste.

Most of us do not rise above our circumstances. We are our circumstances. We have obligations to and from our group. We have responsibility to and for our group. This is not an argument for so-called "collective karma"; rather, I'm arguing that karma as a concept is inadequate to the task of thinking about morality in real life (as opposed to the fantasy world most religieux live in) precisely because human life is collective in almost every aspect.

Let's return to the central thesis of this essay by looking at how we actually pursue justice.

Suffering as an Instrument of (In)Justice

Take a look at the justice system of any nation on earth, including all the nominally Buddhist nations. What happens to people convicted of crimes? They are punished, both in the short-term and the long term.

In the short term, we inflict harm on criminals; we isolate them from friends and family, deprive them of basic freedoms and rights. In other words, we violate the basic constituents of a deontological morality. And note that prison is a punishment that fully takes into account our social nature; it isolates us from our group, forces us to live amongst strangers, pushes us down into an inferior social position. This is how you torture a social mammal.

Sometimes prisons are designed to be humiliating and degrading, while sometimes they are that way because of indifference or banal reasons like lack of resources. Britain's prisons are often overcrowded because governments have decided to imprison more people and for longer but haven't expanded the capacity of prisons to take account of this. Crowding is stressful for social primates, especially with strangers. Overcrowding leads to stress and conflict, and sometimes to violence and riots. Although by the standards of, say, Thailand, the UK prison system is pretty well off. The more we dehumanise people on the inside, the more alienated they are when they get out.

What is the theme of almost all prison-based dramas? The establishment of a society within a society with two options: the redemption of those concerned through friendship and finding ways to hold on to their humanity or suffering under a violent autocracy that may or may not be subverted.

In the longer term, we deny criminals certain types of work, the ability to travel, and we force them to confess their crime repeatedly, i.e., every time they apply for a job, rent a house, interact with the government, and so on. There is no question of making a mistake and paying for it. Once a crim, always a crim.

We behave towards criminals in ways that we would never sanction for ordinary citizens. We treat criminals as less than human. We not only judge them deserving of suffering, we actually stand in line to inflict it on them. And again this is just as true in nominally Buddhist countries as in nominally Christian countries. The savagery of "justice" in Islamic countries is equalled by officially atheist China. So religion cannot be blamed, although I think it is a factor in defining in-group/out-group dynamics. It is often worse to sin against God than it is to sin against a fellow human so that the punishment for blasphemy can be particularly savage. But it's all a matter of degree. Some prisons in the US and UK are every bit as savage as those in less economically developed countries. There have been repeated scandals about the conditions in our prisons at the moment, especially in the private sector. Private sector prisons are a special kind of hell.

The presupposition behind all of this is that suffering creates justice. Or in other words, moral debts are paid in the currency of suffering: immediate and ongoing. And yet it is all too obvious that prison doesn't provide a deterrent or restore the balance of justice. It certainly creates more suffering, but the rationale for making people suffer is bizarre and sickening when you start to think about it.

The Scandinavians lead the way in the humane treatment of criminals and have much lower recidivism rates as a result. They have a much more cohesive society but it has been forced upon them. The government actively interfered in people's lives for decades to create the conditions for the modern Scandinavia. Still, the presupposition that guilt demands punishment is so strong in most places, that "justice" is relentless and merciless at inflicting suffering.

Karma In Real Life

Because I'm a member of a religious Order, I know a lot of religious people. And I would guess that most people I know say that they believe in some form of karma (although some of them define karma in ways having nothing in common with traditional Buddhist karma doctrines). In other words, they believe in the just world fallacy that justice will be restored (usually in the afterlife).

The natural consequence of such a belief ought to be a profound relaxation about injustice. They ought to be laid back about transgressions to the point of fatalism. Jesus said to his followers that if someone was to strike them on the face, that they should turn to give the assailant another target to punch, i.e., "turn the other cheek". Buddhists have an even more extreme version: In our moral stories, the Buddha says that even if robbers were to seize you and cut you apart with a wooden saw, if you had a single negative thought you would not be his disciple. "Vengeance is mine," sayeth the Lord, and all that.

The Triratna Buddhist Order is currently having a crisis because a senior member stands accused of some gross misconduct. The process of "safeguarding" we have adopted from the surrounding British culture has meant that no details have or ever will emerge about the nature of the offence. In the past, we were accused of not dealing with transgressions honestly and in the open so we voluntarily looked at how other groups deal with them and adopted the best practice model with little modification. In this case, it ironically means suppressing all knowledge of the misconduct outside of a tiny group to hide the identity of the accuser (at their request). The deliberating panel included a retired judge (and another outsider), which is meant to reassure outsiders as to the fairness of the procedure.

So now we have the situation where a loved and valued member of our community has been suspended from the Order for an indeterminate period (he thinks it will be at least two years) because they have been accused of something grossly unethical (though apparently not illegal) by someone who will remain forever anonymous. This is apparently what justice looks like in the world of UK religious groups nowadays. The process and outcome contradict my sense of what is just and fair and has made me question my continued involvement in the Order. This has nothing to do with karma and I have pointed out that we should now make clear that as an Order we do not believe in karma. I'm not hopeful.

Despite what they say they believe, no one I know is laid back about injustice. We all want to get involved, to pre-empt karma, to take control of situations and steer them towards the outcome we think best. Most people believe that justice is only served by such active intervention. And we all believe that we are acting for the good; that our motives are above question when it comes to our well-intentioned interventions. The many different recensions of the Vinaya also take this approach. Thousands of rules of conduct were created, often for quite trivial reasons, complete with prescribed punishments including expulsion from the saṅgha. 

I'm not saying that interventionism is unreasonable. We do need to intervene to ensure work is fairly paid and safe. We do need to act to ameliorate climate change. What I'm saying is that this is hypocritical if at the same time one insists on professing to believe in karma or God or any other just world myth. You either believe things will turn out alright, or you get involved.

In my view, suffering is not an instrument of justice. No one deserves to suffer. Even people who, from ignorance or malice, hurt others do not deserve to suffer. Suffering does not resolve situations of tension or unhurt someone who has been hurt. Making a guilty person suffer achieves nothing. Taking satisfaction from inflicting suffering on another person is sick. So no, I don't believe in a myth which organises and enacts this on a cosmic scale. Karma is an idea. It's a human desire to be well treated by our fellow humans and to have good fortune in the world projected onto the universe. Believing in karma is no better than believing in God. However, it is understandable that ancient people would come up with an idea like this to try to explain why things go wrong in our lives: bad faith from humans and bad luck in the world.

This begs the question: what is the alternative. I will make some comments on this in the next instalment. 

~~oOo~~

Doctrine & Reason III: Madhyamaka Karma

4.4 Multiple Versions of Karma

In a recent online discussion with members of the Triratna Buddhist Order I discovered that we have no common narrative when it comes to karma. A majority believe in karma of some kind, but very often the kind of karma an Order member believes in is mutually contradictory with the kind that another Order member believes in. "Actions have consequences" is a relatively common way of expressing karma, but as we have seen (Part II), it is inadequate. The traditional idea of karma leading to rebirth is supernatural by its very nature, but encouragingly, a sizeable minority are reluctant to commit to any supernatural version of "actions have consequences". There is certainly no explanation to be found for karma in nature.

In a sense, the Order reflects the confused history of karma in Buddhism. Different versions emerged from time to time, presumably in response to perceived needs, and many of them were incompatible with others. More or less the only common features are the word karma and the notion that willed actions are somehow significant.

I've critiqued some of the main versions of karma, especially in an essay called The Logic of Karma (16 Jan 2015). So, for the purposes of this argument, I will focus on my critique of the Madhyamaka version of karma, particularly as set out in Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. I don't think I've given a detailed critique of this version before and it turns out to be the one most resistant to reasoned argument and is thus the view most in need of effective refutation.

5. Madhyamaka

5.1 Nāgārjuna the Nihilist

The most difficult version of karma to argue against is the one that begins with Nāgārjuna and comes down to us via various groups that have assimilated elements of his metaphysics (including those various schools that claim the label madhyamaka). It took me many years of  losing arguments with pseudo-intellectual mādhyamikas to work out what is wrong with Nāgārjuna's explanation of karma. As Nāgārjuna says, near the end of his chapter on karma:

karma cen nāsti kartā ca kutaḥ syāt karmajaṃ phalaṃ |
asaty atha phale bhoktā kuta evan bhaṣyati || MMK 17.30 ||

If action and agent don't exist, how would an action produce a consequence?
And if the consequence does not exist, who would suffer it? 

Ultimately, for Nāgārjuna, there is no action (karma) and no agent (kartṛ), thus there is no consequence (phala), no one who experiences it (bhoktṛ), and thus no rebirth, either. At best, they are like an imaginary city in the sky, like a mirage, or a dream (MMK 17.33). So Nāgārjuna rejects the idea of actions having consequences.

I've read a number of explanations of Nāgārjuna's approach to karma and they all baulk at accepting his dismissal of karma and restate the mainstream Buddhist assertion that actions have real consequences. For example, Kalupahana concluded:

"The most significant assertion here is that the rejection of permanence and annihilation and the acceptance of emptiness and saṃsāra (or the life-process) do not imply the rejection of the relationship between action (karma) and the consequence." (1986: 55)

But, clearly, Nāgārjuna does reject the relationship between action and consequence and, what's more, he rejects the more fundamental notions of action, consequence, and relationship per se. To Nāgārjuna, these concepts are not part of paramārthasatya or ultimate truth. How should we read a statement like Kalupahana's which is echoed in other academic work? It seems that Nāgārjuna's rejection of karma and rebirth does not sit well with anyone who identifies with more mainstream Buddhist ideas. To say that agent, action, patient, and consequence are all just illusions is a form of nihilism.

My sense of Nāgārjuna is that he is trapped by his own articles of faith. In maintaining that nothing persists in the face of plentiful evidence to the contrary, he is left with no choice but to obfuscate and distract us from his dilemma. Ironically, we know this because we still have his actual words. They, at least, have persisted for some eighteen centuries. Mādhyamikās (those who follow madhyamaka ideology) are apt to point out that this is not what commentators have understood him to be saying. However, when the text is clear and the commentary contradicts it, we have little choice but to reject the commentary as driven by motivations unrelated to those of the author.

Nāgārjuna's view is a pernicious one, because it destroys the basis of morality. If actions do not have consequences at all, let alone appropriate and timely consequences, the observation of which allows us to modify our behaviour in the future to obtain different results, then morality is simply not possible. If there is no definite relationship between action and consequences, then there could only be chaos. The view appears to be based on a fundamental confusion.


5.2 Arguing Against Madhyamaka

However, this is also a view that is extremely resistant to rational argument, because part of the madhyamaka ideology, at least in its modern versions, is that rational argument has no place in the Buddhist system. Only personal experience counts towards knowledge and experience, by definition not susceptible to logic. Here we see medieval Buddhist folly meshing with Victorian Romantic folly to produce a persistent delusion. Mādhyamikas further stretch the credibility of a critic through the structure of their rhetoric. In the typical conversation about karma, the mādhyamika asserts their view (some variation on MMK 17.30) as though it were ultimate truth (pāramārtha-satya). If one disagrees on any grounds, they assign those grounds to relative truth, which is simply an illusion and can be safely ignored. Thus, any argument against the asserted view is defeated solely on the grounds that to dissent against the ultimate truth is always wrong. One cannot argue with ultimate truth. The use of reason to undermine the assertion of ultimate truth is dismissed or even mocked, because the ultimate truth allows no role whatever for reason. Having declined to recognise the validity of any objection, the mādhyamika will often emphatically restate their view and then refuse any further discussion.

The view itself is irrational, but the defence that any dissent can only be a manifestation of ignorance is potent. It allows the believer to summarily reject any argument without ever having to consider it. One cannot win an argument with a mādhyamika on their terms, so one must shift the terms and one way to do this is to undermine the foundations; i.e., to point out Nāgārjuna's fundamental errors and argue that the framework itself is flawed.


5.3 The Two Truths

The two truths doctrine is completely absent from the early Buddhist suttas. This suggests that the problem which the two truths were supposed to solve did not exist earlier. I see this problem emerging from the confusion of experience and reality. This happened partly because Buddhists took a description of experience and tried to use it to describe reality. At the same time, they singled out certain rarefied meditative experiences and thought of them as reality.

The early texts are fairly clear that the domain of application of Buddhist practice is experience. There is no word that conveys anything like our word "reality", no discussion of the nature of existence, the nature of objects. The focus is on the nature of experience. As Bodhi has said:

“The world with which the Buddha’s teaching is principally concerned is ‘the world of experience,’ and even the objective world is of interest only to the extent that it serves as that necessary external condition for experience.” (Bodhi 2000: 394, n.182

This is highlighted in the Kaccānagotta Sutta (SN 12:15), a text which Nāgārjuna appears to cite, but completely misunderstand. The importance of this text is emphasised by Kalupahana when he suggests that MMK is a commentary on KS. What KS says is that existence (astitā) and non-existence (nāstitā) do not apply to the world of experience (loka). This means that the usual way of looking at objects doesn't apply to experience. When we have an experience, nothing comes into being; when the experience stops, nothing goes out of being. The ontology of experience, especially in Iron Age Ganges Valley, is difficult to pin down, in a way that the ontology of objects is not.

Experience is what it is, fleeting, insubstantial, and unsatisfactory. This was important at the time because Buddhists were in an argument with Brahmins about the possibility of experiencing absolute being (brahman/ātman). The Buddhist argument was that, since absolute being is unchanging, ever-changing experience could not allow access to it. We could not perceive something unchanging, because experience is always changing. So, even if an object was existent in this absolute sense, our experience of it would constantly change.

The classical texts say nothing much about the world of objects, except that they do acknowledge that some objects (particularly our bodies) persist through time. So the world of experience and the world of objects have a different ontology for early Buddhists (to the extent that they have any awareness of ontology). It is only experience that is governed by pratītyasamutpāda. Also, there seem to be no Pāḷi texts that seek to explain karma in terms of dependent arising, but by the early medieval period when Nāgārjuna was writing this distinction had been lost. By then, everything was understood to be governed in the same way. The description of mental events arising in the meditative mind was taken to be a universal principle. And this means that nothing whatever in the world might persist even for a second. And this in a world where objects do persist for years, decades, centuries, and millennia (the universe is currently thought to be 13.7 billion years old and will continue expanding indefinitely).

So Nāgārjuna's task was to explain away the ubiquitous evidence of persistence in favour of a reality in which nothing persists, based on an Iron Age theory of how experience works. He had to allow for persistence, because all the evidence of our senses tells us that external objects persist, while not allowing for persistence because dependent arising applied universally ruled it out.

By this time the Brahmanical arguments about absolute being seem to be a distant memory to Buddhists, which is puzzling because Brahmanical influence is seen everywhere in the development of Buddhism. The problem of absolute being is still present, but it is seen as a mistake that everyone makes with respect to their own experience. Some Buddhist groups were struggling to explain the connection between karma and phala. A Sanskrit term exists for this problem, i.e., karma-phala-saṃbandha, where saṃbandha means "connection".

Since it was completely implausible to assert that the world did not exist (or that existence did not apply to the world), Nāgārjuna was forced to accept that the world does exist. But he argued that this existence is saṃvṛti, a word meaning 'concealing, covering up, keeping secret'. Saṃvṛti-satya is often translated as "relative truth", but a Sanskrit speaker would be alive to the connotation of "concealing reality". In defiance of early Buddhists' reactions against absolute being, Nāgārjuna contrasted the world with an absolute reality: paramārtha-satya, translated as "ultimate reality", or "ultimate truth".

Both saṃvṛtisatya and paramārthasatya are not true. They are mistaken views that come about when we try to shoehorn dependent arising into everything. This is not to say that the experience of emptiness (śūnyatā) is not profound and transformative, only that it is an experience. It changes the way we perceive the world, which is an epistemological change. Ontology is unaffected by meditation.


5.4 The Confusion of Experience and Reality

Nāgārjuna's method is thus the theory tail wagging the evidence dog. And this methodology is one of the reasons his followers are locked into irrational positions. Evidence is made to fit the theory, not the other way around. And since this requires deprecating reason, rational arguments find no purchase. Compare this to the Pāḷi texts were rational arguments are part and parcel of Buddhism, alongside myth, legend, and inner monologues.

Nāgārjuna's worldview was one in which all domains are governed by dependent arising. He appears to see no alternative to this, despite being familiar with and valuing the Kaccānagotta Sutta. But this creates many problems for him, precisely because the persistence of the world and objects in the world is self-evident. Even something as simple as perceiving movement or change become problematic for Nāgārjuna. And, frankly, his task is not made any easier by composing his answers in metered verse.

The central problem with karma is what I have been calling action at a temporal distance, but which Indian commentators called karmaphalasaṃbandha. Karma requires consequences to manifest long after the condition for them have ceased. And this is forbidden by the formula of dependent arising.

Knowledge that we get by reasoning about experience is useful (i.e., an accurate and precise guide to interacting with the world), as long as we are actually reasoning rather than relying on a bias. Accurate and precise ontology requires careful comparing of notes and critical questioning of which assumptions in our worldview are valid. We have to switch to using abduction and eliminate all the impossible premises.  We did not begin to get this right until after 1543 when Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres). The critical comparing of notes about experience is what enables us to understand the world. Unless we make a strict distinction between experience and reality, and have a very critical eye out for bias, we are apt to come to erroneous conclusions.

Nāgārjuna's fundamental mistake was to mix up epistemology and ontology, which is to say that he mistook experience, especially meditative experience, for reality; and the nature of experience for the nature of reality. Meditators I know continue to make this same fundamental error. Buddhists are constantly talking about the "nature of reality", but nothing about how we go about seeking insight could possibly tell us about reality.

It is entirely possible that we might gain insights into the workings of our minds, seen from the inside; that we might gain insight into the nature of experience. And this kind of knowledge is certainly very useful for avoiding misery. And even though reality is an over-arching super-set, which incorporates the mind and experience, as I have tried to show in my previous essays on reality, it is layered, and descriptions that work on one scale of mass, length, energy or complexity, may not work on another scale. So a perfect description of experience may still be a faulty description of other kinds of phenomena. In fact, the classical texts were wrong about the persistence of mental states - these do persist for short periods of time beyond the stimulating sensory contact, else we could not perceive the passage of time or any kind of change. Language and music both depend on this extension in time.

Nāgārjuna's description of reality is copied from a description of experience. Unsurprisingly, he comes to false conclusions about reality. He takes it as axiomatic that nothing persists. Indeed, he says that if anything were to persists that would contradict dependent arising (MMK 17.6). Note again that the classical Pāḷi texts don't have this problem, because they do not take dependent arising as a description of the world, only of experience (i.e., they take it to be an epistemology, not an ontology). In order to accommodate these obviously false conclusions, he has to bifurcate the truth into two domains, apparent and ultimate, because, for example, it is self-evident that our bodies and identities do persist over time. Nāgārjuna accommodates this by saying that it is true, but only relatively true (saṃvṛti-satya); i.e., true only in the sense that we perceive it to be true. In the ultimate view it is not true. Again this mixes up ontology and epistemology.


5.5 Compatibility with Reason

Ironically for modern Western mādhyamikas, our own intellectual tradition, from Heraclitus onwards, tells us that all existence is impermanent. At no point do we assume that if something exists, it is permanent and unchanging, except in the case of God. And since God no longer features in mainstream Western thought, even he is not a problem. For the Western tradition, persistence is not a problem per se because, unlike Buddhists, we do not associate all being with absolute being. We are not forced into the position of explaining away persistence as an illusion, because temporality is built into our notions of the world. We say quite explicitly that we live in a temporal world.*

* Pedants may be tempted to point out that quantum physics theorists are now suggesting that time might be an emergent property. 1. There is no consensus on this speculation. 2. Even if there were a consensus, descriptions of the quantum level are not relevant to the macro-world that was the whole world until the invention of the telescope and microscope in the early 17th Century. 

Rather than the classical position—that neither existence or non-existence apply to any experience—Nāgārjuna is forced into the bizarre assertion that both existence and non-existence apply to everything. Thus, the obviously false conclusions that his philosophy leads to are rationalised away. This is a philosophy in which obviously false conclusions have to be tolerated; the irrational is valorised, and logic is deprecated in favour of a religious ideal. Paradox becomes the sine qua non. And these conditions fit perfectly with the Romantic threads of modernism. The nihilism also fits the zeitgeist in which people feel that they don't matter and have no influence in the world, despite being bombarded with information about events in the world.

However, in our Western tradition, paradox usually suggests a deeper flaw in our understanding, which has led us to make false assumptions, or to frame the problem ineptly. Or they are curiosities. For example, "this sentence is not true" is a trivial example of a paradoxical sentence that is both grammatically and semantically well formed, but is logical impossible. All it tells us is that there is more to language than grammar and syntax. A glance at anyone's eyebrows as they speak could have told you the same.

For all these reasons, the Mādhyamikā view of karma is not compatible with reason. It's not a rational view. Nor, I argue, is it resolved by insight, because those with insight seem to be beset by the same confirmation bias as all of us: they seek and find confirmation of their pre-existing views. Most meditators spend many years absorbing the rhetoric of Buddhism before making any significant progress in developing insight. Thus when insights arise, confirmation bias prompts us to see them as proof of our view.

My best informant on the process of having insights suggests that each insight both shatters existing views, but tends to set up an alternative view. One finally sees the truth and is prepared to settle down with it. However, if we persist in practising, the next insight shows the flaws in this new view and points to another view. One has to go through this "Aha... Oh. Aha... Oh." process many times before one stops taking the views seriously and realises that all views are just different perspectives on experience. It's not that one gains insight into reality, but that one stops mistaking one's experience for reality.

However, Buddhists tend to treat Nāgārjuna as a god -- someone who had infallible omniscience. His words, or at least the interpretations of his words by commentators, are seen as ultimate truth. I notice that some people are puzzled that I would argue against Nāgārjuna. It seems to cause cognitive dissonance, because they accept what he says as gospel. To dissent from the "ultimate truth" is almost unimaginable to many Buddhists. It is akin to blasphemy, and they often respond the way theists to do blasphemy: with hostility.

So why do modern scholars not take Nāgārjuna to task as someone who mistook experience for reality? After all, they are supposed to bring a certain objectivity to their work, aren't they? Buddhist Studies is all about accepting Buddhism on its own terms, rather than taking a critical stance. So in the 21st Century we still find scholars trying to elucidate Nāgārjuna on his own terms and he is still hailed as probably the greatest Buddhist philosopher. To me, Nāgārjuna is the greatest disaster in Buddhist philosophy because his mistake continues undetected and his influence is pervasive (it goes far beyond Madhyamaka). This is partly because the mādhyamika rhetoric is impervious to reason, but partly also because Buddhists don't use reason when thinking about their views anyway: they only seek confirmation, they do not seek falsification. Of course confirmation bias is a feature of argument production, but religious argumentation discourages doubt and scepticism.

This critique will most like not make any impact whatever on the way people see Nāgārjuna or the way his disciples see the world. The way Madhyamaka is set up employs several cult-like features that make adherents particularly hard to reach. Those who do not simply reject the argument out of hand, will condescendingly explain that I have simply misunderstood the ultimate truth. I'm with Richard Feynman however, "I'd rather have questions that cannot be answered, than answers that cannot be questioned."

This concludes the central argument of this essay. It remains to sum up and conclude.

6. Compatible With Reason?

I set out in this essay to explore the idea that the Buddhist belief in karma is compatible with reason. I argued that both karma and reason are complex subjects on which authorities disagree about almost every detail. Karma has few common features across Buddhist sects apart from the proposition that actions cause rebirth. Also, reason and our ability to employ the methods of reasoning have been widely misunderstood. Reasoning is, more often than not, subverted by cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Even so, I tried to set out a coherent account of how reason works and how we might use it to think about karma in general terms. I then critiqued a particular Buddhist view about how karma is supposed to work, by showing how the reasoning in that view is flawed.

The question I posed in Part I of this essay was, could we come up with the doctrine of karma from first principles. That is, based on experience, can we infer—using deduction, induction, and/or abduction—a doctrine in which our actions lead to rebirth; or the watered down version that our actions infallibly lead to appropriate and timely consequences.

Based on observations across many species of primate, Frans de Waal is able to deduce that we all experience empathy and understand reciprocity. From reciprocity we can induce an understanding of fairness and justice. And from this we can construct a highly plausible, bottom-up theory of morality that has broad applicability and explains a great deal. In this view, morality can be understood as a principle in which the social consequences of actions are appropriate and timely.

To get to a doctrine of karma however, we have to go beyond experience and observation, and make a number of unsupported assumptions. Firstly, we have to assume a just world. This assumption is so common that it has its own name: the just-world fallacy. Secondly, we have to assume that a supernatural afterlife exists, in defiance of the laws of nature. Thirdly, we have to assume that this afterlife is cyclic or a hybrid between cyclic and linear. Many religions have a linear eschatology, a single destination afterlife. There is no credible evidence that we cite to help us choose which is the true version of events. In fact, the way the world seems to work rules out all these possibilities. Fourthly, we have to assume that some mechanism connects our actions to our post-mortem fate.

None of these assumptions is compatible with reason, since none of these assumptions is based on inferences from evidence or experience; i.e., they were not produced by reasoning. They are assumptions that we make so that our doctrine works in the way that we wish it to. All the evidence suggests that these assumptions are simply false (an afterlife is demonstrably false). So assuming that they are true is certainly not compatible with reason. And yet, without these assumptions, there can be no karma doctrine. So karma doctrines, as a class, are not compatible with reason.

Forms of morality in which the social consequences of our social interaction are appropriate and timely are at least possible, even if our social groups seldom attain the ideal. Beyond this, reason, fails.

In my critique of Madhyamaka karma I tried to show that the problem of continuity (saṃbandha) remains unsolved and that it seems insoluble within the traditional Buddhist metaphysics. A completely different approach to ontology would be required because the description of mental-states arising does not work as a general description of the world. In other essays I have proposed such an approach. In my proposed ontology all existence is temporary, both substance and structure are real, and structures (such as our bodies and minds) persist over time, for a time. Morality is explained by bottom-up manifestations of empathy and reciprocity, but karma is ruled out because there is no afterlife, no supernatural, and no just-world.

karma is not
compatible with
reason

Belief in karma fails to meet the standard set in Subhuti's essay (cited in Part I). So, the major conclusion of this long essay is that karma is not compatible with reason. By this I mean that no existing Buddhist version of the doctrine of karma is compatible with reason. I also infer that any theory of karma that involves logical fallacies (such as the just-world fallacy) or supernatural elements (such as an afterlife) cannot ever be compatible with reason. Since no logical fallacy or supernatural element is demonstrable, karma also appears to fail Subhuti's verifiability criterion.

~~oOo~~

Post Script. 29 Jan 2017. Someone wrote in to say that my understanding of Nāgārjuna's approach to karma was "obviously false", because he talks about karma in more conventional ways in other texts, such as the Ratnāvalī. But the fact that a Buddhist talks about karma in different ways in different contexts is completely consistent with the trend I first identified in 2013. In contexts that emphasise morality, Buddhists maintain a narrative that emphasises continuity between actions and consequences; for example, in the Jātakas, the personal continuity of people across lifetimes is normal; while in contexts that emphasise metaphysics this continuity is denied, and the idea of any persistence of any kind is rejected. And these two narratives co-exist. Buddhists switch between them without even noticing that they are doing so. Our metaphysics denies the possibility of morality; and yet morality is clearly very important to all Buddhists and karma is maintained in defiance of our metaphysics, without even achieving resolution. So the fact that Nāgārjuna exhibits this same kind of duplicity is not evidence that he does not deny the reality of karma in Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. 

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. (2014). Escaping the Inescapable: Changes in Buddhist Karma. Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 21, 503-535. http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/2014/06/04/changes-in-buddhist-karma

Barrett, Justin L. (2004). Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Altamira Press.

Bodhi. 2000. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: a Translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

Kalupahana, David J. (1986) Nāgārjuna, The Philosophy of the Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. SUNY.

Mercier, Hugo & Sperber, Dan. (2011). Why Do Humans Reason. Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 34: 57 – 111. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000968. Available from Dan Sperber's website.

Subhuti (2007) There are Limits or Buddhism with Beliefs. Privately circulated.

Subhuti & Sangharakshita (2013) Seven Papers. Triratna. See also https://thebuddhistcentre.com/triratna/seven-papers-subhuti-sangharakshita

Yang, J. H., Barnidgeb, M. and Rojasa, H. (2017) The politics of “Unfriending”: User filtration in response to political disagreement on social media. Computers in Human Behavior 70, May 2017: 22–29