Abstract
One of the most widely discussed applications of Buddhist ethics in recent years has been in the area of environmental ethics; here the impact of Buddhist ethics extends outside of the fields of philosophy and religious studies, and has made some significant inroads in ecological discourse in the public sphere. Buddhist ecology nonetheless raises difficult metaphysical questions, including many concerning selfhood. We begin with the seminal origins of deep ecology in the work of Arne Naess, who wrote extensively on Indian and Buddhist philosophy; we then consider echoes of his approach in the work of Joanna Macy, whose engagement with Buddhist philosophy is deeper and based on a more extensive familiarity with Buddhist sources. Some awkward philosophical problems attend the particular ways in which these ecologists incorporate versions of the no-self claim. But not all forms of Buddhist environmental ethics are versions of deep ecology. We sketch a style of environmental ethics that seems to follow from the consequentialist approach of two major contemporary Buddhist philosophers, Mark Siderits and Charles Goodman; we call this approach ‘future-directed’ ecology, to contrast it with an ethical view about temporal symmetry that seems implicit in deep ecology. As well as illustrating how far Western philosophers have come in expanding their knowledge of Buddhist philosophy (as illustrated by the work of Siderits and Goodman, among others), this approach shows how diverse the theoretical options are for contemporary Buddhist environmental ethicists.
The authors wish to thank Chris Framarin, Ashwani Peetush, Noah Quastel, Noel Salmond, Sonia Sikka and Mark Siderits for many helpful exchanges and conversations on the topics and themes of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
This transnational concern for welfare could of course be combined with an approach like Peetush’s in the previous chapter (our remarks at the outset were not intended to imply that a ‘sovereigntist’ bias must be inherent in a Taylorian approach).
- 2.
Damien Keown was among the first to highlight the potential importance of this concept for a modernized Buddhist moral theory, though he also flags it as a potentially divisive concept; he suggests that in one sense, upāya is related to traditional moral cultivation (and thus implies, indirectly, that it may be akin to phronesis); but he also admits that some see upāya as licensing exceptions to moral rules (2001, 157–60).
- 3.
See Chap. 1 for qualifications and reservations about the use of this and related terms. Most of our co-contributors here have sensibly favoured Pali and Sanskrit terms over English ones, i.e. anattā and anātman (though, in citing the secondary literature, it is impossible to avoid references to ‘no-self’, ‘not-self’, etc.).
- 4.
Describing his openness to such ascriptions – his and others’ – as ‘almost limitless’, rather than simply limitless, reflects his earlier hesitation about a ‘wider range’ than (e.g.) plants, but it may be rather charitable to Naess, seeing as a (less credible) limitless openness seems to follow from what he calls his ‘gestalt ontology’. This is a relativist ontology that seeks to vindicate even the most emotive ‘observations’ of intrinsic value simply by situating those emotive claims within the observer’s context, which is just the context of nature itself (see Naess 2008b and other essays in Devall and Drengson (2008)). With this ‘gestalt’ approach, Naess sought to defend himself and others against the charge that investing (e.g.) waterfalls with ethical significance was a merely subjective reaction to the environment. Just as he did not – ultimately – go through with investing all of nature with intrinsic value, however, he would surely not wish to extend ontological status to all reactions to features of the natural environment; and if that is right, then there would have to be limits to his gestalt ontology.
- 5.
Commenting further on this idea – the interdependence of microcosm and macrocosm – Naess adds: “Spinoza was influenced by the idea when demanding an immanent God, not a God apart” (ibid, 37). Cf. the discussion of the Weltgeist element in Spinoza’s ethics (and the later concept of pantheism), in Chap. 5 of this volume.
- 6.
Naess sometimes hints at intermediate stages of widened identification, possibly warding off charges of reductionism or eliminativism. A moderate widening of what might count as self or mind has also been proposed by externalists and enactivists in the philosophy of mind, going back to Hilary Putnam decades ago, and taken further recently by Alva Noë (2009) and Evan Thompson (2007), whose work also engages with themes in Buddhist philosophy and psychology (see also Varela et al. 1991).
- 7.
As Naess explains, though, “As I use the expression ‘realizing the great Self’, it does not correspond to a Hindu idea of realizing the absolute Atman. If I should choose a Sanskrit phrase for ‘self-realization’, I might select ‘realizing svamarga’… The great Self corresponds to the maximum deepening and extending of the sva through deepening and extending the process of identification” ([1985] 2008b, 198).
- 8.
Cf. Pierre Bayle’s critique of Spinoza (discussed above, in Chap. 5).
- 9.
We take no issue here with the belief that past suffering can justify as much compassion as any other suffering (nor, in particular, with a bodhisattva’s compassionate surveying of past lives); the question at hand is whether an acceptance of the reality of past suffering should mitigate the moral urgency of not repeating it.
- 10.
See the discussions of Madhyamaka meta-ethics in the Cowherds’ Moonpaths: Ethics and Emptiness (2016). One recurring thread in those essays – often assumed rather than argued – is that emptiness in relation to selfhood entails emptiness in relation to (all) postulations of intrinsic value. Contraposing that point, and putting it in the form of a critique, some might attempt a reductio of Naess’s ethics on the assumption that notions of intrinsic value must be discarded along with the discarded bathwater of ātmavāda. This assumption is disputable, and can be dispensed with even within certain forms of Buddhist ethics that embrace the notion of intrinsic value (see Davis 2013b, 39–47).
- 11.
Cf. Ashwani Peetush’s discussion of pratītya-samutpāda in the preceding chapter (Chap. 12 above).
- 12.
She has also drawn on Naess’s work, going so far as to say that Naess’s ‘deep ecology’ is an ‘appropriate, secular referent for dependent co-arising’ (1991a, p. xvi) – i.e. paṭicca samuppāda (pratītya-samutpāda) which we discuss below. One notable difference between Macy and the writers listed here is that, for better or worse, they have drawn inspiration from Martin Heidegger as well (for some related themes, see Chap. 9 by Sonia Sikka, in this volume).
- 13.
- 14.
These books will be referred to as MC, WL and AH respectively from now on.
- 15.
WL and AH address environmental issues most explicitly. MC incorporates both Theravadin and Mahāyāna ideas; by contrast, AH is the most practically oriented, but also takes inspiration from the Mahāyānist bodhisattva ideal.
- 16.
GST describes causal networks as ‘open’ i.e. they are able to exchange energy, matter and information; due to this exchange, systems grow in complexity, opening up new possibilities and responses, yet they also display orderliness and equilibrium. To systems theorists, not only wholes, but social institutions and psychological processes can be viewed as systems as well. According to GST, cause and effect can modify each other; in such cases, feedback loops can be negative (which stabilize the system, maintaining equilibrium) and/or positive (which support deviations leading to ‘novelty or instability’ (MC 1991a, Chap. 4)). These processes manifest themselves equally in ecological systems and in any adequate process for gathering information about, and finding patterns in, our natural environment (ibid.).
- 17.
This ‘great turning’ can be seen as having three dimensions – direct action (actions that protect the earth), life-sustaining practices (building new institutions in the economy and in society) and an underlying shift in consciousness (a change in values and perceptions and the recognition that changing the self and the world is at root a single endeavour) – all implying the involvement of community rather than just the individual (AH, passim).
- 18.
See AH, passim; and cf. Goodman (2009). The aspiration to be ‘liberated’ from this world may seem contrary to an engagement with ecology; but some Mahāyāna traditions also offer an ideal of ‘non-abiding’ nirvana, which replaces the goal of liberation from the world with a goal of liberation within the world (cf. Davis 2013a).
- 19.
Of course, many Buddhists would strengthen ‘can be facilitated by…’ to ‘must be guided by…’ – but Macy is not so prescriptive, tending to favour an approach along the lines of Naess’s ‘platform’ for collective ecological action (where the basic principles of ecology can be the object of a kind of overlapping consensus, instead of a doctrinal foundation).
- 20.
The Abhidharma tradition in Buddhism, Macy argues, diluted this understanding of mutual causality by focusing on dharmas (psycho-physical units of svabhāva), rather than the dynamic processes at work between them. Rejecting this in favour of a theory of dynamic causation and a praxis of compassion, indicates one source of attraction she acknowledges in Mahāyāna tradition; we discuss another below.
- 21.
World as Lover, World as Self contains one of her most relevant discussions in a chapter called ‘The Greening of the Self’; here she blames the current planetary crisis on confusion about identity and self-identification. Echoing Naess’s revisionist notion of ‘self’, she says the proper role of ‘self’-identification is not to posit a substantial entity but to deploy metaphor(s) under whose guise we construct our identity and our place in the world; this understanding must open onto a wider ‘ecoself’ construct whereby the outlines of the ‘old’ self are extended to a being that is co-extensive with other beings and life on our planet. She credits Buddhist writings with praecursors of this extension of identification.
- 22.
Sometimes a different term is here substituted for pratītya-samutpāda, e.g. yuganaddha, a Sanskrit term used in Tibetan philosophy; cf. Odin (1982), who explores this Tibetan conception of interdependence.
- 23.
Siderits (2016) offers a similar critique of what he calls the ‘Indra’s Net strategy’ in Buddhist environmental ethics, echoing kindred criticisms in Ives (2009, 2013) – the problem being due to this strategy’s inadvertent ‘erasing (of) all distinctions’ (Siderits 2016, 135). Some Buddhists might reply that by shifting to an ultimate level of truth, terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ do not apply; and of these, those who shun transcendence (e.g. in the name of ecological engagement) might argue that interdependence is a reality rather than a norm. At that point, however, a different problem arises about why people, and especially those who need persuading, should care about the environment on this view – even if they accept its view of interdependence (cf. Gowans 2015, 178 – who connects this to the classical is/ought problem in ethical theory).
- 24.
At a theoretical level, Macy may end up precluding a robustly future-directed perspective for another reason, which is that she proposes a deconstruction of the means/ends distinction that underlies it: she believes it is a mistake to consider any ‘end’ to have an independent existence, whereas on the mutual causality view the goal cannot be seen as independent but only as interdependent with ‘means’ (MC 1991a). This may represent an interesting point of departure from Naess, whose focus on ‘intrinsic value’ (construed independently of biospheric egalitarianism) marks a degree of continuity with the ‘future-directed’ approach we will discuss.
- 25.
Nor, for that matter, should any philosopher assume that egoism is false (if for no other reason than that philosophers should be wary of assumptions in general). Likewise, most major traditions of Buddhism offer arguments to demonstrate the dogmatism and/or the incoherence of egoism (cf. Siderits 2003 and Goodman 2009).
- 26.
Siderits (2003, 42). In Chap. 5, Davis & Renaud consider a ‘Weltgeist’ construal of Spinoza’s substance (akin to a common German Idealist reading of Spinoza). Here we should recapitulate the ‘special case’ of monism discussed above, which we might call the ‘moral homogeneity of past and future’. The problematic consequence of deep ecology, in that context, was a disproportionate ‘respect for the past’, but it is important to keep in mind that this is not just an abstract oddity of a general theory; it may also be connected to a traditional ecological ideal, the ideal of ‘conservation’. Like many others, we develop ideas here that aim at disentangling worthwhile notions of conservation from some insidious forms of conservatism (insidious enough to creep even into deep ecology).
- 27.
Many ecologists taking a monistic perspective (‘deep’ or not) probably assume that the single being must be physical; but one reason for seeing Naess and Macy differently is their kinship with Buddhist views, most of which are not naturalistic, let alone physicalist.
- 28.
Views that are closely akin to punctualism are sometimes called ‘time-slice theories’, e.g. time-slice theories of rationality or of morality, which may in turn be based on a time-slice theory of the metaphysics of personhood. Brian Hedden (2015) has recently defended the former, borrowing ideas from Derek Parfit, but based more on a scepticism about settling the metaphysics of personhood rather than a full-blown theory of the latter. Parfit’s approach remains influential in the contemporary literature (despite his having apparently marginalized it in his final work in ethics, i.e. Parfit (2011)); but see the reservations about time-slice-centric approaches in Stephen Harris’s chapter (Chap. 11) above, in the section entitled ‘Parfit, Reductionism and Morality’.
- 29.
It might be thought that their holist ontology would rule out such a model, but it is worth bearing in mind that (a) holism does not necessarily exclude every form of reductionism; (b) normative punctualism need not presuppose ontological reductionism; and (c) those who are reductionists about personal identity need not be physicalist reductionists about mental states (let alone other natural phenomena): Vasubandhu, for example, seems to have been a temporal-parts reductionist even though he rejected physicalism (cf. Oren Hanner’s (2016) reductionist reading).
- 30.
- 31.
We ask the reader to bear with any apparent incongruity in the use of the term ‘punctualism’, which could be resolved with a more elaborate terminological apparatus (for another occasion). We are interested in something quite opposed to any ethic that would prioritize the nearest ‘point’ in time; such points may be fundamental to the framework, but the future-directed framework gives equal weight to all points where sentient beings exist.
- 32.
The reservation about saying ‘their…’ is parallel to a reservation that would be needed if one were to say ‘certain humans…’, as the punctualist could not coherently say that some particular humans reach a pre-eminent standing (due to exceptional capacities) and then retain that standing through a lifetime. Again, the view does not fundamentally distinguish between different people, but rather within lives (and capacities will strengthen and weaken, not necessarily according to fixed patterns, through the course of any life, human or non-human).
- 33.
- 34.
This may – though not necessarily in all variations – amount to the diametric opposite of a narrative conception of personhood (which Peetush discusses in Chap. 12, above). It would be yet another indication of the rich diversity of Buddhist philosophical options, if indeed this punctualism could be formulated in Buddhist terms, just as some narrative accounts could be.
- 35.
See Goodman (2009, ch. 11) on some deep differences between Buddhist and Kantian moral philosophy. Keown and others take a different view of this; but many differences would remain even if such conciliatory efforts succeed.
- 36.
As Damien Keown (2001) argues – who, nonetheless, discusses utilitarian interpretations quite extensively, precisely because many early writers on Buddhist ethics favoured this comparison. Keown (2007) applies his virtue-based approach to environmental ethics, as several other Buddhist philosophers have done in recent years. For a variety of other virtue-based approaches, see Sahni (2011).
- 37.
Knowingly or not, he thus echoes an idea shared by William James and Bertrand Russell; but it is worth bearing in mind, as Nalini Ramlakhan shows in Chap. 10 above, that James and Russell were themselves influenced by ideas in Buddhist ethics and/or Buddhist spiritual axiology (as these were (imperfectly) understood a century ago).
- 38.
Some will even go beyond experience, which is one reason why deep ecologists should not rule out consequentialist frameworks for their ethics (insofar as intrinsic value might be thought to reside in a non-sentient thing); but we set aside this possibility here.
- 39.
Only some of these states could have value, of course; otherwise, this approach would be vulnerable to the same sort of objection that Naess faced as a result of his axiological levelling of all things in nature (i.e. vulnerable to a ‘problem of evil’ that implies we must make room for conditions of the possibility of distinguishing good and bad).
- 40.
Though, like many Buddhist ethicists, he stresses the importance of animal welfare as being among the core practical concerns of Buddhist ethics (e.g. 2009, p. 3).
- 41.
One might contrast the somewhat less rationalist phenomenology of karunā, defended by Jay Garfield in ch. 6.
- 42.
A more disconcerting objection, meanwhile, would be that this approach is not fundamentally about protecting the environment, but about optimizing it, in a sense – e.g. at times, it could justify measures that would enhance the environment. Up to a point, this is true, as this is not a conservative philosophy. But to speak disparagingly of ‘optimizing’ would not be fair either: on this view, sentient beings should not be ‘optimized’ for ulterior purposes, unless those purposes return benefits to sentient beings.
- 43.
Of course, what is meant here is that microbial disease-causing agents have little or no intrinsic value; in other words, little or no additional value can be discerned after one has accounted for whatever instrumental value they may (sometimes) have. As for their potential instrumental value, this would need to be treated more delicately than we have space for here. Obviously we do not have things like biological weapons in mind; but there are open questions about the ethical use of chemical or biological agents that allow a controlled eradication of disease-causing insects, as well as ‘natural’ examples (more openly contemplated by some ecologists) of diseases that have historically regulated wild populations of various species.
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Davis, G.F., Sahni, P. (2018). Variations on Anātman: Buddhist Themes in Deep Ecology and in Future-Directed Environmental Ethics. In: Davis, G. (eds) Ethics without Self, Dharma without Atman. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67407-0_13
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