Mapa estratégico

Having now set out crucial aspects of my position, let us now address the lingering concern of aptness. Consider again the case of Elie Wiesel, outlined in Chapter 3. There is a danger here that, in advocating for the patient perspective, that it will appear to apt-anger-defenders like Srinivasan that we might therein be failing to take Wiesel’s reasons for anger sufficiently seriously.225 _{If the result of advocating the patient perspective is that I am} contending that Wiesel should not have been angry, then surely this is so! However, I think there is a response available here to those who would defend an aptness-moderationist position. This response is, in fact, bound up with another potential criticism — that we might be being asked to reduce agents to mere automata when we are asked by Śāntideva to consider them as we would bile or a stick, thus dehumanising them. However, I want to suggest that taking a broader perspective on someone’s harmful actions

224 _{BCA 6.1-2}

225 _{It was actually the soldier’s anger that was described in this case, but to make the point as}

strongly as possible for the moderationist I think the reasons for the hypothetical anger of a Holocaust survivor is a good example to work with.

towards us does not amount to treating them as though they are mere automata. Questioning why we treat ‘the sentient’ differently to bile on the pedagogical reading isn’t intended to make us dehumanize others, but instead to make us understand that the sentient are not exempt from the sorts of laws that govern everything else. They too follow the principle of dependent arising, and so their harmful actions occur (or arise in

dependence) as a result of many things, including some beyond their control. Far from being dehumanizing, this is precisely a humanising process, and one which is familiar to us within our justice system. When a judge considers sentencing for a crime, they factor in the circumstances under which a crime was committed: was the theft of the loaf of bread a wanton act, or was it born of necessity? We could condemn the action and assign blame regardless, but our response to it is mitigated by a broader consideration of the

circumstances. At a certain point of abstraction, we might find assigning blame to individuals the least relevant consideration — for instance, where there is systemic injustice, the patient perspective might help us to focus on the need for broader social change rather than punishing specific individuals who have brought about this injustice (I will discuss this further in Chapter 5).

We also value this sort of broad perspective approach in other domains. Consider, for instance, aesthetic appreciation. We can respond to artworks in isolation, but we tend to think that the better responses — real art appreciation — come as a result of understanding where the work sits in relation to a broader set of facts about its history, artistic traditions, and so on. It might only be possible to properly appreciate the work of Cézanne, for instance, if one knows something about representationalism, the invention of photography, etc. Our judgements about artwork might be considered more apt under such a perspective, since our reasons would (all things being equal) better support such judgements. As such, this sort of perspective applied in the moral realm could be thought to have similar consequences i.e. our emotional responses to moral situations will be more apt when they are informed by a broader perspective, and most apt when they are informed by the broadest perspective. Thus, proponents of moderationism who take the

approach of Srinivasan would presumably admire this methodology when it comes to ethics. As such, I think the approach I am suggesting does take concerns of aptness very seriously.

In this way, there is a point of convergence between apt- moderationist and Buddhist eliminativists: they can both agree on the benefits of the method although for different purposes. The moderationists probably would and should want to improve the criteria for the aptness of anger, and taking a broader perspective serves this very purpose. For

Buddhists, however, adopting such a perspective is meant to help you get rid of suffering. As such, the advantage of approaching this problem from the pedagogical reading is that we find some means that we could possibly share, instead of simply acknowledging that they have different ethical and metaphysical conceptions which may not lead to any solution at all.

However, it must be admitted that such a solution plays into the Buddhist plan. Even though moderationists initially want to resist the Buddhist metaphysics, by adopting a broader perspective they already take one step further to the Buddhist mode of thinking — the very mode that begins to erode the moral concepts that we usually employ, and that make us push back against the metaphysical view (agent, patient, praise, blame, etc.)

It is at this point, then, that we need to say something more on the way that the Buddhist metaphysical view erodes our familiar way of doing moral reasoning. It does not fall within the scope of this thesis, nor does it yet fall within the scope of my expertise, to make a defence of the

metaphysical picture here. However, we can explore the implications of accepting this position. What we shall see, below, is that the implications of the truth of the metaphysical system bear out the claims made above about the pedagogical reading of the texts.