Abstract
This chapter turns to a penultimate intentional class of killing which takes persons as representations of comparatively abstract or symbolic (religious, ethnic, political, ideological) identity, and so worthy of attack. It analyses the metaphysical and cognitive differences between this and prior classes of killing, and how these make it as an intentional act prey to ontological illusion and cognitive error. Buddhist arguments account for these epistemic, as well as normative, failures of justification. Nonetheless, that Buddhist critique has to concede the bare efficacy of ‘representational killing’ (RK) as a causal operator, despite its failing Buddhist justification, thus introducing the distinction between conventionally true justification, in a Buddhist-epistemic register, and conventional worldly practice, in an extra-Buddhist one. Yet this concession to the sociohistorical convention of killing (as RK) as a practice for resolving conflict is seen to also fail a larger Buddhist telos of civilisational progress: the difference between a more or less enlightened human order. In this case, universal human rights are construed, in a Buddhist sense, as based on the dignity of persons not by virtue of deontological reasoning but rather the universal compassion of Buddhist philosophical ethics. Only an ethics of rights which registers the normative dimension of cognitive insight along with compassionate affect, is able to undermine the kind of pervasive reification of persons that gives rise, on a depth-psychological level, to the ongoing possibility of representational killing—a problem which obtains as much in the Buddhist, as the non-Buddhist, lifeworld.
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Notes
- 1.
The first and second of these categories entail predominantly negative or unskilful, the third ostensibly neutral, the fourth compassionate or positive, intentional affect, en groupe representing a sliding scale of highly negative and determined towards (in theory) positive and voluntary psychological-affective motivation. However, we saw that the latter two intentional categories were also compromised in Buddhist terms by essentially unskilful intention.
- 2.
Nagel’s claim is mediated by the conceptual apparatus of just-war theory and the international law of war, but its observation of a fundamental principle holds across the intentional range of RK, particularly as it bears on the notion of justification.
- 3.
As earlier, this account takes in foundational canonical and Śrāvakayāna tenets; their extension in the psychological and phenomenological accounts of the Abhidhamma, and commentarial elaboration in Theravāda and Sarvāstivāda schools and exegetes such as Buddhaghosa and Vasubandhu; the specifically epistemological emphasis of the Pramāṇavāda in Dharmakīrti; and where these otherwise intersect with Mahāyāna tenets in the Madhyamaka. What is then largely excluded from this account are specific doctrines that mark out the Vaibhāṣika Abhidharma (and to which Sautrāntika is opposed), as well as idealist claims of the Yogācāra (despite their variable presence in aspects of some works, among others, of Vasubandhu and Dharmakīrti). This account is thus representative of a central body of Indian Buddhist doctrine, and hence of a ‘mainstream’ Buddhist account of intentional lethality as described.
- 4.
- 5.
Dharmakīrti (at PVSV ad PV 1.144a) discusses how universals cannot change reference because direct reference to them allows thought and language to indirectly refer to the individuals instantiating them.
- 6.
For an ethical discussion see Appiah (2005).
- 7.
The constructedness, and so ultimate unreality, of universals need not for that reason be epistemologically impotent. Dharmakīrti (in his Sautrāntika guise) accepts that there can be more or less non-deceptive conceptual constructions on the basis of paradigmatically true perceptions of an externally existent supporting-condition (ālambana pratyaya), in virtue of its real perceptual representations (ākāras). It is in virtue of this degree of the reality of representations that human cognition is for Dharmakīrti able to engage and manipulate worldly items with a commensurate degree of success. But this might not be the case in all worldly transactions, involving the assumption of universals, in causal operations with real objects.
- 8.
For example in the intentional structure of ideological warfare. This differs intentionally from war waged as national defence, which does not necessarily entail conflict over antithetical ideological identities. (In practice these can overlap or merge so that, for example, the Second World War was fought defensively against German territorial ambitions, but also against Nazi ideology as anathema to liberal-democratic values.) Defensive war in a Buddhist context is briefly considered in Chap. 13.
- 9.
If in some cases of RK, such as that instantiated in ideological warfare (e.g., the Vietnam War), lethal agency is intentionally mutual, then this structure is symmetrical. In others, such as those pertaining to coercive colonialism or genocide, it is not. I will for convenience assume in what follows an asymmetrical relation that can be applied from either side of the dual structure.
- 10.
Yet we’ve also seen, in Chap. 10, how Kant was willing to conceive of the agent of lethal crime as qualifying for being the representational means of a transaction of justice intrinsic to the ends of the authority of the state. So even for Kant there were cases where the autonomy of the person qua particular (however apparently self-legislating) must bow before an abstract universal value enacted, and represented, in the putatively just taking of life.
- 11.
See Repetti (2016), Davis (2017), Dasti and Bryant (2014); see also Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Special Issue 25, 2018.
- 12.
Hershock (2000, 13ff.) however has useful discussion of the assimilation of Kantian moral epistemology and its effects in modern human rights discourse to a Buddhist or non-Western paradigm.
- 13.
For a Madhyamaka-theoretic account see Mendelson (2013).
- 14.
At least until, for example, the 1993 Declaration towards a Global Ethic, emerging from the Chicago Parliament of the World’s Religions, which included Buddhist commitments to human rights and prompted discourse from Buddhist figures such as H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama (see his 1993 Vienna statement in Keown, Prebish and Husted 1998, xviiff.).
- 15.
In a footnote (55, p. 78) Keown summarises this: “A more familiar way of making the same point in Buddhist terminology would be to say that all beings are potential Buddhas or possess the Buddha-nature.”
- 16.
Cf. Perera (1991, 24) and again Keown (2018b, 545–547). Junger (1998, 61) also appeals to this ground, as does Sevilla (2010) in a Zen account. Some among these writers however appear confident of founding a notion of rights within Buddhism directly on an appeal to a universal Buddha-nature as an assumed posit concerning all human beings. My own claim is different: that a plausible basis for human dignity, but not directly for human rights, lies in an immanently universal potential for liberation from suffering central to the Buddhist traditions, rather than in a positively assumed transcendental nature as such.
- 17.
Adam (2013) focusses in particular on the non-anthropomorphic feature of a Buddhist theorisation of equality and rights.
- 18.
In northern Rakhine state, Myanmar, beginning in 2012 but especially through 2016–2017, perpetrated by Buddhist Bamar and Rakhine military and civilian actors against civilian Muslim Rohingya unrecognized citizens of that state. The ethical and legal ramifications of widespread heinous rights violations are ongoing, likely to culminate at the International Criminal Court in convictions of members of the Myanmar military, and some of its state enablers, of the crime of ethnic cleansing.
- 19.
This claim draws on background detailed in two documents reporting ethnic-cleansing in Rakhine state: Flash Report of the OHCHR Mission to Bangladesh, 3rd February 2017 provided by the U.N. Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner; and “They Gave Them Long Swords”: Preparations for Genocide… (July 2018), prepared by Fortify Rights.
- 20.
See for example Ihara in Keown, Prebish and Husted (eds.) (1998, 51, n. 21); cf. Junger (56, 60–61) in the same volume.
- 21.
A substantial historical catalogue of Buddhist abuses includes Japanese military atrocities in the Second World War, Sinhalese Buddhist abuses against Tamils during the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009) and since, and Burmese military atrocities against political actors and minority religious and other ethnicities during periods of dictatorship (from 1962 to 2012, and in 2021). Human rights abuses notably continue unabated in China (Tibet), Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and Cambodia.
- 22.
Keown (2018b, 531) points out that a number of traditionally Buddhist states or polities (including those of Cambodia, Thailand, and Tibet) have initiated institutions dedicated to human rights, alongside those ASEAN members (Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) signatory to the Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) founded in 2009. However, the aspiration to engage human rights, at least in some cases, has not always translated into robust implementation.
- 23.
See Hershock (2000, 15ff.) for an account of some of the still-relevant ill-effects of the same imposition.
- 24.
Among other statements, see again his 1993 Vienna statement “Human Rights and Universal Responsibility” (in Keown et al. 1998, p. xviiff.).
- 25.
It is of course a hermeneutic truism, claimed even by historical actors themselves, that the causal seeds of World War Two were planted in the conditions of the end of World War One. (However, the same effect has not obviously applied for the end of the former war.)
- 26.
It’s also true of Mādhyamikas who see their own global anti-realist thesis not as a view that stands outside, or at the foundations of, the constructedness of views, but is itself just that view which allows all views (including its own) to comprehend their foundationless nature—its epistemic advantage being that the Mādhyamika specializes in reflexively demonstrating just how that is the case. For Mādhyamikas and Pramāṇavādins whatever fails even conventional validity manifests a deceptiveness or irreality (alokasaṃvṛtisatya) that cannot be taken as real in any sense, or only as a sheer falsehood.
- 27.
Consider again the decisive Allied victory over Nazi actors and ideology of World War Two.
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Kovan, M. (2022). Representational Persons: Identity as the Object of Killing. In: A Buddhist Theory of Killing. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_12
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