Two recent books on Buddhist ethics join an ever growing body of work exploring this increasingly popular topic. Besides being well-written and admirably clear, these particular books share a focus on early Buddhism and the Theravaada tradition. However, they also amply demonstrate the divergent ways in which Buddhism can be interpreted, especially as to what Western ethical theories apply and what implications are to be drawn regarding the treatment of contemporary moral problems.
Damien Keown's Buddhism and Bioethics is perhaps the most ambitious example of such work to date. His central purpose is to expand the range of topics considered in discussions of Buddhist ethics, particularly into the area of medical ethics, where he sees Buddhism, because of its systematic attention to human nature, as uniquely qualified to make a substantive contribution to contemporary thinking. Accordingly, he divides his work into three parts. The first lays out his findings regarding the "Buddhist view" on ethics generally and the concept of a human life specifically. The second and third parts cover what Keown takes to be the salient biomedical issues, namely beginning-of-life and end-of-life conflicts and concerns.
Building on his earlier work, The Nature of Buddhist Ethics, Keown attempts to lay down the operating assumptions implicit in his approach. First, he argues that one can talk of the Buddhist tradition as a whole and of the "Buddhist view" in regard to specific issues. His own approach is one he describes as fundamentalist," meaning that it is based on those scriptural sources from the earliest period of Buddhism that have continued to exert influence up through the present. Thus, Keown tends to emphasize the basic texts of the Theravaada tradition, only occasionally turning to the Mahaayaana or the actual practices of contemporary Bud-
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dhist societies either for clarification or support of his reading of basic Buddhism. Second, he argues that Buddhist ethics are virtue-based and thus very much in line with an Aristotelian or even natural-law moral philosophy. Echoing the conclusions of his previous book, he claims that "Buddhism postulates a certain goal or end (telos) as the fulfillment of human potential, and maintains that this goal is to be realized through the cultivation of particular practices" (p. xii). In this case, the goal is nirvana, and the practices are those prescribed by the Eightfold Path, the Precepts, and so on.
Keown then moves on to offer what he takes to be the Buddhist view of human life and its associated goods. In brief, human beings are psychophysically complex beings made up of both matter and form through the association of the five skandhas. These include the body, feeling, thought, character, and vi~n~nana, often translated as "consciousness" but which Keown prefers to render as "spirit." As he remarks, "I do not think it would be misleading to refer to vi~n~nana in certain contexts as the spirit [his emphasis] of the individual. Vi~n~nana is the spiritual DNA that defines a person as the individual they are" (p. 25). Later, he goes on to offer a more physicalistic image, suggesting that vi~n~nana is more akin to the electricity that drives a computer, the rest of the skandhas suggesting, I assume, the hardware and software.
While it is clear that Keown is trying to move away from the cognitive connotations implicit in the word "consciousness" as a translation for vi~n~nana, readers might well wonder whether either of his alternatives makes much sense in the Buddhist context. Whatever else it may entail, the concept of anatta clearly excludes any sense of a self or soul as an enduring entity that could serve as a criterion of personal identity over the course of a distinct lifetime or through rebirth. And talk of "spirit" or "spiritual DNA" does seem to suggest a something that could serve such a central and unifying role. The more physicalistic analogy with a computer's electricity also seems to ignore the clearly cognitive and mentalistic associations that go along with vi~n~nana and suggest the usual translation.
The issue is an important one, because much of what Keown has to say regarding the application of Buddhism to bioethical issues hinges on his understanding of the traditional Buddhist reverence for life. That reverence, according to Keown, consists in a particular account of the course of a human life from conception to death as a spiritual progression toward nirvaa.na. Human life stands at the apex or end of the cycle of rebirth, representing the chance for release. It is the crowning achievement of the entire life process as Buddhism conceives it. Moreover, a human life is a composite of material form and the "spiritual DNA" that invests that form. In support, Keown refers to traditional Buddhist theories of the gandhabba or intermediate being existing between birth and death,
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which is attracted to a material form, thus initiating the life process all over again. So for Buddhism, the most important stage of the nirvaa.nic process, a human life, begins with the investment of material form by the spiritual essence of a being's ontological individuality, its identity, through sa.msaara, strongly suggesting a process of ensoulment. Furthermore, the karmic stage represented by a human life retains value even in periods of intolerable suffering and pain. For Keown, this explains why Buddhism, though concerned to root out suffering, is not overly concerned to relieve it, or to relieve it by any means necessary.
Such a position has important implications for the various biomedical issues Keown considers. And since the view of life at stake is so similar to that found in various natural-law positions, it is no surprise that Keown's Buddhist ends up sounding much like a conservative Roman Catholic. Dividing his discussion between beginning-of-life and end-of-life issues, Keown stakes out the following positions. With regard to the first set of issues, human life begins if not at conception then shortly thereafter, as the gandhabba infuses the material form that has been made available through human coitus. The very existence of a developing human being signals the presence of vi~n~nana and represents the full flower of karmic life on its way to nirvana. Hence, abortion, as well as abortifacient contraception, is completely unacceptable to Buddhism. Equally discouraged is any form of experimentation with human embryos or artificial reproductive techniques that involve the destructive disposal of unused embryos. All such actions would, given Keown's Buddhist understanding of life, violate the First Precept's prohibition on taking life.
End-of-life issues such as the definition of death, the termination of futile treatment, and euthanasia are also handled in terms of Buddhist reverence for life. Euthanasia even in the service of relieving suffering is disapproved of, though the termination of medically futile treatment, even if temporarily life-saving, is not. Any action that hastens the end of karmic life is un-Buddhist, but in cases of the latter sort, the life in question is unsalvageable and the primary intention is to avoid suffering, not encourage death. Thus, Keown's Buddhist would most certainly disapprove of removing life support from patients such as Nancy Cruzan or Karen Ann Quinlan, who were in what is called a "persistent vegetative state." However, Buddhism would never dictate overriding a "do not resuscitate" order for a terminally ill patient.
The Buddhist medical understanding of death, while not an issue in traditional sources, and consequently lacking any scriptural precedents, nonetheless consists for Keown in what is known as the "whole brain" as opposed to the "higher brain" definition of death. "Whole brain" death involves loss of function in all parts of the brain including the brainstem, such as is the case in a coma, while "higher brain" death involves loss of function in the neocortex or any other regions essential to conscious
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experience. Keown's Buddhist would favor the former version on the grounds that, again, as long as the body continues to function, there is vi~n~nana present, which is not to be confused with the ability to think or entertain experiences. Thus, only when, as he says, "the integrated functioning of the body is lost" can we say that a karmic life is over.
As should be evident, Keown's short book is dense, tightly argued, and very provocative. He writes clearly, making good use of examples and Theravaada sources in order to support his interpretation of Buddhism. My reservations generally have to do with whether Keown, given his approach, can authoritatively speak for all Buddhists, authentic Buddhists, or even "core" Buddhists, although he is quite right to point out that modern Buddhist opinion is divided over such difficult issues as abortion. Plenty of alternative interpretations of the key Buddhist concepts Keown employs exist, some of these differences of interpretation being at the root of the Mahaayaana/Theravaada divide.
It is also the case that bioethics involves a much broader spectrum of issues than appear in Keown's book, and while he cannot be faulted for being selective, it would be helpful to have his views on Buddhism's approach to entirely different categories of problem than those considered. For example, problems of distributive justice in the allocation of health care and such scarce resources as organs for transplant continue to vex ethicists and policy makers alike. Other issues such as surrogacy, genetic research and testing, interpersonal conflicts such as between mother and fetus or doctor and patient, and protocols governing the use of human subjects in medical experiments all pose equal and difficult challenges to our ethical intuitions. Additionally, various metaethical issues involving the equilibrium between principles and the unique particulars of individual cases have surfaced in bioethics and have obvious consequences for Keown's tendency to read Buddhist ethics as based in universal moral law. In fairness, though, Keown does tackle a similar issue in his interesting discussion of the idea advanced by William LaFleur and others that Buddhist ethics involves a form of "moral bricolage," a sort of mix and match of principles and customs tailored to the specifics of particular moral challenges, an interpretation that he forcefully rejects.
However, Keown's is obviously not the last word in Buddhist ethics, and David Kalupahana's book, Ethics in Early Buddhism, nicely illustrates just how different such interpretations can be. Where Keown takes Buddhist ethics to be virtue-based, Kalupahana argues exactly the opposite. An Aristotelian virtue ethic, in Kalupahana's view, makes no room for moral principles largely because Aristotelian epistemology excludes any idea of necessity as attaching to human conduct. For Buddhism, moral principles are of tremendous importance, as evidenced in the role of the Precepts and the Eightfold Path, for example -- which is not to say that Buddhism has no role for the virtues. They remain "the foundation
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of moral life" but only as a starting point, a necessary condition for moral progress. Buddhist ethics remains teleological on Kalupahana's account but not on the Aristotelian model. Rather, nirvaa.na or freedom remains the ultimate goal, but possession of the virtues is only the first step. More important is practice of the various moral principles that make up the Eightfold Path, practice that aims not to cultivate and solidify the virtues, but that aims toward nirvaa.nic release.
Drawing on earlier work that situated Buddhism philosophically as a form of pragmatism, Kalupahana argues that its ethics involves a particularist rather than a universalist approach to moral problems. On the one hand stands a deontological absolutism as enshrined in the Hindu Brahmanic tradition and its emphasis on doing one's duty or one's caste duty regardless of consequence, an attitude Kalupahana associates with the Bhagavad Gita. On the other hand stands the fatalistic amoralism of the ascetics or, no better, the conservative Hindu utilitarianism of Kautilya. Between such extremes Kalupahana finds Buddhist ethics, eschewing both the duty-bondage of Brahmanism and the freewheeling anarchism of the various materialists and ascetics. The Buddhist moral universe encompasses moral principles and duties but only in the service of real people on the "noble path" toward nirvaa.na, and not some remote abstraction or absolute. Echoing his earlier findings, Kalupahana labels this approach "moral pragmatism" and sees it as a principled encouragement to individuals to moderate their behavior in a manner consistent with everyone's enlightened self-interest.
Ethics is inherently social in Kalupahana's view, and an ethics develops in the process of mutual adjustments between individuals such that they enhance the overall quality of social life. Kalupahana associates this attitude with the core Buddhist principle of "dependent co-arising" (pa.ticcasamuppada), giving it a distinctively communitarian spin in this case. The emphasis on the virtues and the moral path of life stresses a strategy of moderating one's "possessive individualism," thus ensuring the mutual accommodations necessary to smooth out potential social conflict. In the third and final section of his book, after outlining the historical and intellectual context of Buddhist ethics as well as the relevant concept of a moral life, Kalupahana nicely, but all too briefly, explores some of the ramifications of a moral pragmatism in regard to such issues as social justice, appropriate political institutions, and respect for the environment. His conclusions are not surprising; for example, he argues that Buddhism would favor a correctional rather than a retributive approach to rectificatory justice and punishment. But the discussion does flesh out his picture and suggest connections between distinctively Buddhist virtues and those necessary for civil society.
However, Kalupahana's venture into pragmatism and its consequences also raises a question or challenge to his overall account. The
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Buddhist life is a struggle toward nirvaa.na, and the successful pursuit of such a life is very demanding, with very special requirements. A moral pragmatism of the sort Kalupahana outlines is not nearly so demanding. It requires only that individuals moderate the extremes of their behavior in a manner consistent with everyone's self-interest. At most, individually we need to value or respect each other as fully self-interested and yet different people. While it is quite true that Buddhism encourages a similar moderation of human greed, it also pursues, as does each individual Buddhist, a much larger agenda.
Furthermore, it is not clear to me that self-interest, no matter how enlightened, is of any real value to Buddhism, especially since much Buddhist literature is devoted to showing the futility of desire, no matter how moderated. A life lived in the pursuit of self-interest does not square with a Buddhist life, even on Kalupahana's account. Thus, while moral pragmatism, so conceived, might share some Buddhist values such as moderation, it is not clear that Buddhism is itself a form of moral pragmatism.
To conclude, both books make valuable contributions to the scholarly and philosophical discussion of the Buddhist tradition specifically as well as to moral philosophy generally. Each amply demonstrates Buddhism's relevance to contemporary applied and theoretical ethics without unduly oversimplifying the complexity of the tradition. Furthermore, these books are well written, well argued, and amply annotated.