Consequentialism, Particularism, and the Emptiness of Persons: A Response to Vishnu Sridharan

Introductory Remarks

Many Indian Buddhist texts have a great deal to say about metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and the philosophy of language; many of them offer quite a bit of guidance about how to live, and about the qualities of mind and heart that are worthy of ethical commendation; but most of these texts say nothing at all about the topics that we today would classify as ethical theory and metaethics.

Yet there was at least one Indian author who aspired to systematize Buddhist normative teachings into a coherent and general framework. This was the eighth-century North Indian monk Śāntideva. In his two major works, Śāntideva again and again justifies deviations from what would otherwise be binding moral rules whenever a person with compassionate motivation sees that these deviations would have good consequences.¹ He formulates what he calls a “universal characteristic of downfalls,” thereby staking a claim to be offering a fully general action-guiding principle for the conduct of bodhisattvas—and that principle turns out to be a statement of utilitarianism.² He bases his entire ethical stance on a robust and consistently articulated conception of impartiality that centrally involves agent neutrality. And at Bodhicaryāvatāra (henceforth BCA) IX.90-103, he presents his Ownerless Suffering Argument, which seeks to justify the uniquely rational status of an unrestricted, impartial benevolence by appealing to the doctrine of no self.

In my book Consequences of Compassion, I sought to argue that the various forms of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist ethics can best be understood as forms of consequentialism. I would now concede that many Buddhist authors simply didn’t say enough about ethical theory to pin down any particular interpretation of the theoretical structure of their views as the uniquely correct one. However, the arguments alluded to in the last paragraph give us more than enough evidence to motivate the conclusion that Śāntideva was a consequentialist. In particular, a very fruitful way to read Śāntideva is as a reductionist about personal identity who also accepted what Parfit calls “the Extreme Claim”: that if reductionism is true, I have no reason to give my future selves premium treatment, no reason to be any more concerned about my own future well-being than about the well-being of others.³ The conjunction of these two views, which we could call extreme reductionism, contrasts with moderate versions of reductionism that have less revisionary normative consequences.

Vishnu Sridharan argues that my consequentialist account of Śāntideva’s ethics oscillates in an unstable way between moderate and extreme versions of reductionism about persons. He also proposes that a form of particularism would be a better interpretation of Śāntideva’s views. But a careful examination of the issues involved provides us, as I shall try to show, with reasons to resist these claims.

Consequentialism, Reductionism, and Discourse about Persons

According to Sridharan, in order for my view to be both consistent and a form of extreme reductionism, I would have to regard “the well-being of impersonal events” as the good that consequentialism seeks to maximize. In articulating my view in previous publications, though, I never used this phrase. And for good reason: I doubt that it makes any sense.

What does it take for it to be intelligible to regard some entity as having well-being, so that it is capable of being benefited or harmed? This is an interesting question; we might ask whether biological life is sufficient, or whether sentience, or rationality, or some other condition is required. But there is one necessary condition for having well-being that should be utterly uncontroversial. George can have a higher or lower degree of well-being, and can be benefited or harmed, only if George could have existed, and can exist in the future, in a variety of different situations, in each of which he would have different properties. Had certain events occurred, George would have been happy; had matters unfolded differently, he would have been miserable. In one scenario, he would have turned out to be kind and generous, but in other scenarios...