Buddhism and Ethics: How Useful is the Idea of the 'Middle Way' for Thinking About Ethics?
The reason why I am writing this thread is because I do appreciate the idea of 'the middle way' in Buddhism as a basic point for balanced approaches to ethics. It looks beyond the idea of 'perfectionism' in morality and ethics as being about real life dilemmas. This goes beyond the idea of ethics and morality as being about salvation on a personal level.
Nevertheless, the concept of the 'middle way' is a blurry one in application to ethical dilemmas. It could end up with a watered down form, in which all extremes are rejected. This may also go into the territory of politics, as well as dilemmas of personal morality. I see the concept of the 'middle way' as a principle for careful thinking, but wonder how may be it seen as as a basis for ethics? How useful is the idea?
Nevertheless, the concept of the 'middle way' is a blurry one in application to ethical dilemmas. It could end up with a watered down form, in which all extremes are rejected. This may also go into the territory of politics, as well as dilemmas of personal morality. I see the concept of the 'middle way' as a principle for careful thinking, but wonder how may be it seen as as a basis for ethics? How useful is the idea?
Comments (37)
One important aspect of Buddhist ethics may be seen as a breakaway from the authoritarian ethics of many forms of religious thinking. It is not necessarily a secular form of materialism but about the scope of widest thinking. I am not trying to suggest that Buddhism is the one and only way of thinking, but looking to see it, and its metaphysical foundation. It is in that context that I am asking about the idea of the 'middle way' and to what extent is it useful in thinking about ethics?
Since a middle way assumes a middle path or placement between extremes which are otherwise accessible, when applied to ethics (i.e., the study of good and thereby right and bad/evil and thereby wrong), it leads toward a logical contradiction:
The ethical middle way shall be in-between being or acting in manners which are most good and most bad/evil - and shall furthermore value itself as the middle way as that which is most good. Thereby resulting in the following contradictory proposition: The greatest good in being or else acting is to avoid being or else acting in manners that are the greatest good. This such that in the same way and at the same time a) one ought not be or else do that which is the greatest good and thereby right and b) one ought to be or else do that which is the greatest good and thereby right.
(The terms best and worst would be better fit grammatically in the above, but they do not clearly specify ethical notions of good and bad/evil.)
Otherwise reasoned, if balance between good and bad/evil is of itself good, then an infinite regress into bad/evil will result in which that which is good can never be obtained. For one will always need to be in-between that which is good and that which is bad in order to be or do that which is good.
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I havent yet come across any Buddhist doctrine that recommends as favorable a middle way between that which is ethically good and that which is ethically bad. For example, in Buddhism's endorsement of compassion, I've yet to hear that "its best to not be very compassionate but instead to also be somewhat callous". If you have, however, can you provide links or references?
Thanks for your reply and it does seem to involve the ambiguity over ideas of good and evil. Of course, the Buddha was writing prior to ideas of Nietzsche and Jung, which throw absolutism of good, evil and ethics open.
I wonder how compassion fits into the picture. That is because it involves a certain amount of distancing from moral absolutes and ethical ideas. However, compassion is not merely abstract, detached from moral feeling and issues of practical ethics.
Quoting Jack Cummins
In which way do you find that compassion is a distancing from moral absolutes and ethical ideas?
To re-frame the issue into Western lingo, some in the west have upheld that love is the greatest good. Compassion is certainly inherent in, if not equivalent to, love - from self-love, to romantic love, to all other (some might say less selfish) forms of love.
In Western terminology, this can be stated as God/G-d is equivalent to absolute love which is equivalent to absolute good. So that wherever love occurs so does God/G-d in due measure. This train of thought is often enough expressed by mystics, such as the Sufi as one well enough known branch. But it is at the very least also echoed in JC's teachings as Christian doctrine: e.g. both "love thine neighbor" and "love thine enemy". There's also the Corinthians' "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."
At any rate, I don't yet understand how compassion is to be construed as a distancing from the moral absolute of the Good.
The concept of compassion may not be straightforward. That is because it involves moral feelings as well as ethical ideals. Part of the dilemma may involve aspects of moral judgmentalness. It involves the distinction between the act and the person committing a moral action. It comes down to the dichotomy of ends, or consequence of actions, as opposed to motivation and intentionality.
With compassion, it may go beyond rationality, to empathy. The idea of 'love your neighbour as yourself' may involve this. Part of the problem may be that each person has so many neighbours, which may bring the question back to Kant's categorical abstract.
However, that is still abstract and it may be queried whether compassion may override this. There are universal principles of rationality. Nevertheless, the existential aspects of embodied existence may make the idea of compassion go beyond the mere principles of reason alone.
My own perspective on ethics is that the integration of reason, emotion and the instinctive aspects of life are important. However, there may be so many juxtapositions In the search for balance. Imbalance and error may be important here in resets and human endeavours towards wholeness, as opposed to ideas and ideals of perfection.
I can very much respect this. As to "endeavors towards wholeness", I tend to find wholeness in this context and wholesomeness to be virtually indistinguishable. None of us are such or can obtain anything near this state of being in this lifetime. But does not the endeavoring toward this end of wholeness in itself speak of an ideal wherein wholeness awaits to become perfected?
Of course the person known as Buddha did not write and never directly contributed anything to what we know today as Buddhism. The writings came centuries after he died. Oral accounts did until then. How do we even know what Buddha may or may not have really said?
One relevant book which is useful in thinking about wholeness is, 'The Wisdom of Imperfection', by Rob Reece. He links Bufdhism and its idea of enlightenment with Jung's idea of wholeness. Jung spoke of the emphasis on moral perfection within the Judaeo-Christian tradition( it would apply to Abrahamic religion in general). It led to the accumulation of a shadow, as a dark side of the repressed and suppressed aspects of human nature. This involves a tension between 'good' and 'evil', which needs to be balanced to combat the destructive aspects of human potential and power. He spoke of this in the form of nuclear warfare, but it applies to both individual psychology and humanity on group levels.
The 'middle way' can be seen as the tension between opposites, of ideas of 'good' and and 'evil'. It may be more of a symbolic concept because it may be realised in so many differing ways. Schumacher made a specific interpretation in 'Small is Beautiful' in which he looked at the emphasis on capitalist growth and the socialist concern for needs. He saw the idea of the 'middle way' as offering a way of balancing of the extremes in a positive way.
The Buddha, like Jesus Christ, are figures of certain ideals. So much would have been different completely if their ideas had been written by them as opposed to by others. As it is so much is attributed to them or projected onto them. With Buddha, like Christ, this has meant that many different traditions within Buddhism have emerged rather than one set of definitive interpretations.
First of all, it requires interpretation in terms of the culture and society within which it was articulated. That is the basis of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation. When the Buddha articulated the 'middle way', he had specific kinds of 'extreme views' in mind. It wasn't simply a kind of bourgeois 'moderation in everything'. One extreme was asceticism in pursuit of purification, and the ascetic practices of the time were indeed extreme. On his quest, the Buddha fasted almost to death, and in fact there is a class of Buddhist icon which represents Siddhartha Gautama (as he was known prior to the enlightenment) as an almost skeletal figure:
It was on the verge of death that according to legend the Buddha was offered sustenance by a passing milkmaid, upon which he renounced extreme asceticism as profitless and unworthy.
The opposite extreme, of sensual self-indulgence and pursuit of pleasure, is represented by what he had renounced, a life of relative luxury. Thereafter he recommended a 'middle way' of avoiding both extremes of asceticism and luxurious living, although of course the traditional mode of life of a Buddhist monk is still ascetic from the perspective of modern culture, if not from that of ancient Eastern culture.
However the middle way is also intepreted on a philosophical level as the avoidance of two extreme views, namely, those of nihilism and eternalism. (The philosophical form is called Madhyamaka, literally 'middle way.)
Nihilism is the view that at death the body returns to the elements and there are no consequences of actions performed in this life (or karma). There are various forms of nihilism, one of which was represented in the early Buddhist texts by the Carvakas, materialists, often merchants or aristocrats, although there were also nihilist ascetics.
The other extreme is eternalism, which is a harder idea to fathom. Here is where the culture has to be taken into account, as in ancient Indian culture, there was already a strain of belief in the fact of re-birth, that beings are re-born in the various states of being according to their karma. 'Eternalism' was the view that, first, there is a forever unchanging kernel or essence which migrates life to life and which stands apart from all change and flux, and second, that the aim of the religious life is to be born in higher states of being in perpetuity. Whereas the Buddha's teaching was that there is no such unchanging kernel or self, and that the aim of the religious life is not to enjoy propitious rebirth but to escape altogether the plight of continued rebirth.
Of course, that is a bare outline of the basic ideas of the middle way, but they have been elaborated over millenia in many different cultures and settings.
Afaik, "perfectionism" & "salvation" are religious ideals, not ethical principles. For avoiding extremism (or dogmatism) in moral judgment, I prefer more naturalistic (adaptive) approaches such as Aristotle's aretaic golden mean, Epicurus' disutilitarianism and/or J. Dewey's pragmatic ethics to the esoteric "middle way" of Buddhist practice.
Thank you for your post, as it does seem that you have read widely on the topic of the idea of the middle way. Some popular authors may have presented it far too superficially.
It is true that perfectionism is more about salvation, whereas ethics is about social action. With esotericism, I wonder to what extent it is focused on salvation or deeper aspects of life and ethics. One aspect of this was the way in which the esoteric was often for an inner circle within a religion whereas there were less strict moral guidelines for the wider group.
I am not sure that the esoteric is simply about personal salvation as such. In particular, the idea of karma is not simply about personal gain through moral action. Some may say it is, but it may be more about a deeper understanding of causality, as in the principle of 'As you sow, so shall you reap'. This is because the idea of rebirth is not necessarily about continuity of the 'self' or ego. It may be seen as being about the future lifeforms and the ethical principles regarding concerns of future generations.
Quoting praxis
There are more nuanced ways of thinking about the alleviation of suffering via the realization of the no-self within the grasping ego. For instance, philosopher Shaun Gallagher, taking inspiration from the work of Francisco Varela, links the modern empirical discovery of the absence of a substantive I' or ego with the Buddhist concept of non-self, and imports from Buddhism the ethical implications of the awareness of this non-self, which he formulates as the transcendence of a grasping selfishness in favor of a compassionate responsivity to the other. Gallagher(2024) summarizes Varela:
Gallagher sees in Varela's account a strong normative conception of the Good.
'He who saves his own life will loose it'. Transcending egoic consciousness.
:100: Thanks for the introduction to Shaun Gallagher.
Its from a lecture he gave earlier this year at University of Tasmania. You might enjoy watching it:
The point I aim to make is that not believing in life after death, or being a materialist, or non-religious, is not nihilism. To believe that it is nihilism is denying reality and a rather extreme view, a grasping view.
NB: Nietzsche's suggestion that belief in life after death, being an immaterialist or being religious (e.g. a Christian) is nihilism this life, this world, Nature-devaluing makes sense to me.
I don't see what your response has to do with the substance of my previous post. In reference to the thread title (topic). As a moral naturalist¹ I find "esotericism" like Buddha's "Middle Way" though it can be somewhat interesting useless "for thinking about ethics".
(2023)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/857773 [1]
From the perspective of (some of) the religious, it is nihilistic, by definition so.
Do you suppose you can describe and explain things in a neutral, objective way that is beyond perspective(s)?
What reality is being denied by this?
When phrased this way, it certainly sounds nihilistic.
But at least in the fundamental Buddhist texts, the Pali Canon, it's not phrased that way. You'd just have to read those for yourself, it's too much to post here even just the relevant passages.
That said, we extinguish everything that makes us who we are anway. It's just that we do it slowly, gradually, and usually without thinking of it in terms of "I am extinguishing everything that makes me me". For example, we identify with our food for as long as it is in our mouth and stomach, but then when we excrete it, we disidentify with it.
To be clear, such views are typical for Mahayana and Vajrayana schools of Buddhism, but certainly not for Early Buddhism, nor for Theravada.
What do you mean by definition? That isnt the definition of nihilism.
It's fairly common for religious people to think that non-religious people are leading meaningless, aimless, worthless lives. This belief is part of the foundation for their apologetics and proselytizing.
We could quote doctrinal tenets from religions that say as much.
Religious people are lead to believe all sorts of things. That doesnt make what they believe true.
It is not that I don't appreciate your position of moral naturalism. As far as the relationship between ethics and religion (including esotericism) the two evolved together. Even though Aristotle's approach was more naturalistic than that of Plato it still had spiritual foundation.
Ethics still matter with or without religion and there is a danger of Dostoevsky's idea that without God 'everything is permissible.' At the present time of relativism there is such a mixture of overlapping worldviews.
I find the Buddhis perspective interesting as it is neither materialistic or with a literal anthromorphic deity. The middle way may be a way beyond so much of the false ways of ethics based on guilt tripping,Also, the middle way is also in the context of the overall emphasis on compassion, which is a about respect for people and all life.
:chin: Why do you believe this?
For instance, the ancient Hebrews would not have survived as a "people" viable social group "wandering for 40 years in the wilderness" had they not (usually) observed moral prohibitions against murder, lying, theft & adultery BEFORE they had received "commandments" (and subsequent Mosaic Laws).
As a reasonable generalization, h. sapiens must have survived for at least a hundred millennia or so as a eusocial instinctually moral species BEFORE they had invented "religion", so why do you say "the two evolved together"? Clearly, religions much later had coopted ethical norms, no?
I think I can understand the argument youre endorsing: one way to paraphrase my understanding is that one ought not strive to be perfect in the here and now if one is to cultivate virtue and moral means of accomplishing moral ends. If this is in keeping with what youre seeking to express, then Im in full agreement.
Yet I still find that following this general approach to applied ethics requires holding some future ideal reality in mind toward which one strives. Heres what I take to be a worldly example of this:
In here taking for granted the premise that prostitution is immoral, there then are two general means of moving toward its obliteration.
The first, which Ill label puritan, is to outlaw all prostitution with the most draconian laws possible in attempts to obliterated it in as soon a time as possible given the realities of the current world as is.
The second means, which Ill tentatively label non-puritan, is to first acknowledge the myriad reasons for prostitutionto keep things simple, here only addressing willful prostitution (rather than unwilful sex slaves of one form or another): all these reasons generally pivoting on it being a means of gaining an income within a context where prostitutions many risks and downsides (physical and mental) are to be deemed better than the alternatives of not prostituting oneself (from ones own starvation to the starvation of ones children or parents to the more frivolous its more financially profitable than any other means of making money"). Were society to be one where a) no people would pay money for sex with others, b) all genders would be rewarded with equal pay for equal work, c) people would be respected as fellow beingsand so forththen no prostitution would occur, for no one would find reason to prostitute themselves. But society is not such currently. So, currently, some will always find prostitution preferable to its alternatives. The non-puritan who wants prostitution to not occur on grounds that it is an ethical wrong (as per the given premise), would then see it best to make prostitution legal and thereby regulate its commercethis till the world changes into a humanitarian realmplacing prostitutes far away from kids, ensuring that prostitutes are and remain healthy (STD tests and so forth), that no prostitute gets raped by customers, and so forth. A potentially longer story made short, here the means are a gradual progression toward a world in which prostitution will no longer occur due to an eventual respect for all fellow human beingsthis, by starting to respect prostitutes as fellow human beings (rather than deeming them as expendable and deplorable).
Both the puritan and the non-puritan in the scenarios presented, however, will hold the very same future ideal in mind when attempting to put their respective means in practice: that of a future world devoid of prostitution. It not that the non-puritan seeks a balance between good and evilthey in fact seek the very same evil-devoid good which the puritan desiresbut the non-puritans outlook and reasoning is not absolutist in terms of what is possible to accomplish in the here and now.
In the here and now, for the non-puritan there is balance between extremes, yes, whereas for the puritan its a worldview of absolute good and absolute bad. But bothas theyve been herein so far addressedwill nevertheless seek the same perfected state of being: The non-puritan by following a balanced approach toward this future state of perfection (with the puritan likely to deem this approach perverse in so far as it accommodates what is bad). The puritan by imposing an absolutist view of what is good and what is bad upon all others (with the non-puritan likely to deem the puritans approach as unrealistic, shortsighted, and blatantly mistaken in believing that the puritans means can ever accomplish the given and otherwise shared goal).
While Im sure this terse appraisal via the example of prostitution can be disparaged by many, it does provide an outlook on what I myself generally endorse: a non-absolutist, balanced approach toward moving toward a better future. Yet, again, this very notion of a better future which was just stipulated will itself be an ideal regarding future states of beingwill steadfastly remain the goal which is pursued.
(Not trying to write a thesis on this one subject here, but yes, fyi, I myself deem prostitution to be an ethical wrong which can only be realistically done away with in time via what Ive here termed non-puritanical means. Means which I thereby take to at least attempt to hold greater compassion toward prostitutes in general as fellow human beings, hence as fellow human beings with the same needs and rights as the rest of us. Our own imperfections very much included.)
I think of the Middle Way, even in its ethical application, as not so much a behavioural/choices path of moderation, as a 'place' or 'state' or 'perspective' which exists in the 'gap' 'between' the extremes; or where there is no thing such as extremes, because there are no opposites period; that is, differences are dissolved (whether that is a psychological, metaphysical or epistemological 'place' or concern, let the experts decide). I.e., the path to insight is neither one of overindulging the Subject nor depriving It; but rather shedding the illusion that there is a Subject to overindulge or deprive.
How this path translates into ethics is now more clear. For the sake of brevity, at least as a starting point, Ethical behavior is not driven by the desires of the illusory Subject. Or, in more conventional terms, ethical decisions are egoless.
I can imagine. So would actually turning the other cheek. And, anyway, what really is ethics? Yet if decisions were made in the direction of these ideals, might not they be tending towards the ethical?
Of course :ok:
Personally I believe 'ethics' gave rise to 'religion'. I am using those terms rather broadly though.