by Greg Goode
‘Tis a common observation, that the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects, and to conjoin with them any internal impressions, which they occasion, and which always make their appearance at the same time that these objects discover themselves to the senses.
Hume (2000)
It is quite common to project a property onto an object and then “forget” that we have done so. We then assume that the property is inherently part of the object instead of put there by us. Examples are easy to come by. When George W. Bush used the phrase “axis of evil” to describe Iran, Iraq and North Korea, people found it easy to think of evil as an inherent feature of those countries. When we think that ice cream is nice because of the pleasure it gives us, we may come to feel that “niceness” is part of the recipe, like sugar.
My (Greg’s) favorite example of projectivism comes from those loveable imbeciles, Beavis and Butt-Head. I’m quoting from memory here, so I might not have it exactly, but here is how I remember it. I laughed for several minutes at this small interchange. Beavis and Butt-head are sitting on their couch watching music videos on TV. A video comes on that they don’t like.
Butt-Head: Uh, this music video sucks!
Beavis: Heh-heh. Yeah! I hate music videos that suck!!!
Butt-Head: Uh, yeah!
Having projected their dislike onto the video, our boys now think that suckiness is an inherent property of the video itself!
Again, David Hume:
[Taste] gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue. ... [Taste] has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation.
Hume (1998)
We are not offering projectivism as an objective origin of the idea of inherent qualities of objects. But it is a plausible alternative to the idea of truly inherent properties. The lesson that projectivism has for the emptiness teachings is this: with projectivism, qualities are mind-dependent, and therefore empty.
Evolution
Richard Joyce gives an interesting evolutionary account of why moral principles feel objective and categorically binding to us. He argues that human populations whose members believe in objective moral principles have been favored by natural selection. That is, moral realism is an evolutionary adaptation. Taking morality as though it is objective enhances helpful, reliable behavior within groups, and the resulting cooperation increases a group’s survival prospects.
This explanation has the interesting consequence: we hold objectivist moral beliefs simply because they are fitness-enhancing, and not because they are objectively true.
The evolutionary account also raises another serious challenge for the idea of objectively true moral values. Just because objectivist moral beliefs might have been adaptive and useful in prehistoric times does not even imply that they are necessarily adaptive in the different world in which we live now. For example, our once adaptive craving for sugary, salty and fatty foods is not so adaptive in today’s epidemic conditions of obesity and high blood pressure.
Avoiding Moral Nihilism
If moral principles are not inherently existent, does this mean that they are altogether nonexistent? A Buddhist would answer no. It just means that moral principles are empty of inherent existence. They don’t exist independently of the specific human contexts in which they are meant to apply. Then how do they exist? They exist conventionally within these contexts, and they serve as valuable guidelines to attitudes and behavior in a number of ways.
This is sufficient. Moral principles do not need to exist in any more objective way. Abiding by non-objective moral principles is actually something that expands the heart towards other people. If we think that non-objective moral principles must lead to ethical chaos, this is analogous to thinking that not believing in an absolute, lawgiving God must lead to social chaos. It is safe to say that more chaos comes from taking these things as objective than from taking them as empty.
HH the Dalai Lama is a shining example of someone who has profound insights into the emptiness of everything including moral phenomena, and through this very insight into emptiness (as his school of Buddhism teaches) he can generate the compassion he does. This even includes, as he has expressed on many occasions, always maintaining his compassion for the Chinese.
What To Do? How Can This Help?
Once you have refuted the existence of objective moral principles, you may wonder what to do with that knowledge. We follow Joshua Greene in recommending that we try to make the world a better, happier place through changing how we think and talk about morality. As we have reported before, seeing things (including morality) as empty has actually increased our moral sensitivities, as well as the desire to help others. There are many ways to embrace morality and open your heart to others. Why not explore them? You may begin with the selections listed at the end of this chapter under Further Readings. A good start may be the short, sweet PowerPoint presentation by Antti Kauppinen, which is accessible online.
There are several benefits available to you as an emptiness student when you dissolve the notion of moral objectivity:
Seeing morality as empty fosters a more tolerant, non-judgmental attitude towards others and oneself.
Joshua Greene (2002) proposes that “moral realism makes it difficult for people with different values to get along with one another because people who have practical disagreements are less willing to compromise if each of them thinks she has the Moral Truth on her side.”
Dissolving moral objectivity loosens the grip that rigid “should” and “ought” statements can have on your life. You don’t feel pushed around or controlled by these statements.
Seeing morality as empty eradicates the metaphysical demand that you may feel to chase a one true morally superior life. Without this metaphysical demand, you feel greater compassion for yourself, and more contentment with the life you already have.
Meditations on Moral Objectivity
Start with the metta meditation or other meditation that opens the heart and generates a feeling of compassion.
Next, take a moment to reconnect with the target of refutation that you had found earlier. The target would be a moral principle that seems objectively, inherently true and binding. You can make the principle more vivid by imagining a real-life situation that this principle is supposed to govern. For example, if the principle you came up with is the injunction against killing innocent humans, then think about a bank robber shooting the bank teller before the teller can press the alarm button.
Think about how this act seems very wrong. Try to get a good sense of the seeming objective, mind-independent existence of this wrongness. If the act is objectively wrong, then it may also seem that moral principle that makes it wrong exists in a mind-independent way.
Now, we will try to find this objectivity. We will see if it can withstand our three arguments:
Mini-Meditation – Diversity
Notice that the idea of killing innocent human beings is thought of in different times, cultures and situations in vastly different ways. There have been headhunter societies. There have been religious crusades. There is the notion of “collateral damage” as innocent noncombatants are killed in war when a bomb is dropped.
And then there are accidents, such as when medications are swapped in the hospital, or when a car slides on a patch of ice and swerves out of control. We often employ a moral calculus to decide the rightness and wrongness of such cases. But do you really feel that all the provisions and exceptions we come up with actually correspond to mind-independent moral facts?
Mini-Meditation – Strangeness
What kind of fact is this moral principle that says killing is objectively wrong? Can you come up with a means of knowledge or method of discovery for this wrongness? If this wrongness is actually objective, as we feel it to be, then just how do we discover it?
As a means of establishing an objective moral fact, we need a method that is more cer
tain and more reliable than a mere feeling or intuition. How is it done? Does God inform us? Is the process similar to perception? What color is objective wrongness? Is it similar to logic or to the equation 2+2=4? If we cannot find any such means of knowledge of this objective moral fact, doesn’t it seem more plausible to think that it is not objective after all, but constituted with the help of human participation?
Mini-Meditation – Parsimony
Try to think of a plausible explanation for the “killing is wrong” principle that is based on sociological or anthropological grounds. Try to think of a way to account not only for the principle itself, but also for the sense of objectivity it seems to have. Does the evolutionary account seem able to explain why we think killing is wrong? Does evolution seem able to explain the sense of objectivity too?
If we can account for this principle with the help of biological and sociocultural tools, then why posit something totally extra? What is the necessity of positing a mysterious principle that exists all by itself in a mind-independent way? What work is performed by this objective principle that is not already performed by our cultural findings? And if we are positing this principle as objective, is that sufficient to actually prove that it is objective?
Try to see how objective existence of this principle is unnecessary.
Mini-Meditations on Moral Objectivity: Conclusion
We have discovered that we cannot find a moral principle that exists in an inherently existent, mind-independent way. We have also shown that we do not need a moral principle to be mind-independent in order for it to serve as a guide to our thinking and acting.
Moral Objectivity – Concluding Meditation
Many of us have the idea that there is something like an objectively, morally best way to live. And then we feel like our job in life is to seek and find this best way to live. Spiritual teachings can sometimes prompt us to think this way.
It can also feel that if we haven’t found that best way, we have failed. This failure can feel horrible. It can feel as though we are living a wrong life because we have missed out on the one and only best life that we were meant to live. But wait a second! The life we live is complex, messy and ambiguous. We fulfill different roles each day, each week, month and year. We play the roles of mother, father, son, daughter, employee, romantic partner, member of our local community, and these roles make different, sometimes conflicting moral demands on us. Given this messy and changeable situation, can we find a single, unique, absolutely best way to live? If we think we can, how do we know it? Through what means do we discover it?
Isn’t it more reasonable and plausible to see our moral situation as based on many moment-to-moment negotiations and tradeoffs, without an optimal, globally binding recipe that we are obligated to follow? In fact, can we even give a coherent meaning to this idea of a single best life? Does it even make any sense? We are free to set this notion aside!
What does that leave us with? If one single best life makes no sense, then there is no single best life that we must chase. As the mirage of the best life dissolves, a wonderful opportunity opens up before us to be content with the life we may have now, or a large variety of lives that we can co-create for ourselves. Instead of one best life, we can choose from among many great lives! This is the freedom we can enjoy when the compulsion to chase the mirage of the best life is finally gone.31
References
Burgess, J.P. (2007) “Against Ethics.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. 10 (5):427-439. This manuscript has been circulated privately since 1978.
Garner, R.T. (1994) Beyond Morality. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Hume, David (1998). An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford Philosophical Texts). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Hume, David (2000). A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford Philosophical Texts). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
CHAPTER 14 – LOOSENING UP FIXED MEANING IN LANGUAGE
The target in this chapter is a certain notion of meaning, which we will call “representationalism.” According to representationalism, a word represents an object in the world. A sentence represents a fact or state of affairs in the world. Meanings come from the objects and facts that our language represents. So for example, the meaning of “cup” comes only from the small, hard, round, hollow object sitting on my desk that has tea in it. With representationalism, the object and the word are defined as being inherently separate from each other. The represented object is thought to be inherently existent.
We will show how this notion of meaning is incoherent. We will also suggest an alternate notion of meaning called “holism,” which harmonizes nicely with the Buddhist theme of interdependence. Our approach is inspired by the revolutionary philosophical work of Willard Van Orman Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty.
More About Representationalism
Representationalism is a theory about meaning. The key idea is that bits of language are thought to represent bits of reality outside of language. The term was used by Richard Rorty, a philosopher who considered himself an anti-dualist and who argued against representationalism in one form or another for most of his career.
We think that representationalism is a very common way to think about words and the world. It could be the way that most people in the modern West think about these things. We were both representationalists for much of our lives. I (Greg) was a sort of dreamy, philosophical youngster. I imagined certain magical relationships and shared essences between words and the objects they named. Sometimes it seemed to me that the word even looked or sounded like the object, and this was because of some deeper relationship that they had together.
So, it would seem to me that the sound [D O G] carried some sort of resemblance to the object. The object was out there, the word was in here. But they were still related through an essence I was sure I could discover some day. When I learned other languages, such as Spanish and German, my theory was upset at first. But if I thought about it, I was soon able to perceive commonalities between [P E R R O] and [H U N D] and the very same object. What made me a representationalist, and not a poet, was that I thought I was discovering these shared essences, not creating them!
There are many Western philosophers, beginning with Aristotle, who have created theories about how these representations are supposed to work. Here is a selection of claims related to representationalism:
Through physical and mental processes, the object in the world causes our ideas and words about it.
Since the object helps cause our ideas and words about it, there is a unique relationship. The word represents the object.
The object provides the meaning for the word.
Sentences work the same way.
Sentences represent facts, not just single objects.
True sentences are the ones in which the representation is accurate. This theory of truth is called correspondence, and we cover it in Chapter 16, “Challenging a Common Notion of Truth.”
We learn new things by matching up bits of language with bits of the non-linguistic world.
There are similar views related to representationalism. Realism is the view that holds that the objects we refer to exist in a predetermined way, independently of how we think of them. Linguistic atomism refers to the claim that the meaning of a word resides in the object it represents, without depending on other words. The picture theory of language refers to the way that representation is supposed to work, by picturing. According to this theory, language is a logical picture of the world.
Never fear! Just because you may be a student of the emptiness teachings doesn’t mean you have to study all these theories. But you may run across some of these representationalist views in your own thinking someday. These various teachings may help you see through them and each one of these teachings has very good emptiness-based refutations.
In the next section, we will summarize the objections to representationalism and will talk of another way
to think about meaning.
Representationalism also has implications for the notion of truth. With representationalism, truth becomes a matter of correspondence, or a good fit between a sentence and the world. We will cover the correspondence notion of truth in Chapter 16.
What’s Wrong with Representationalism?
We will focus on three problems with the representationalist view of meaning. One, it is alienating. It makes us feel cut off from the world, because the world is defined as existing totally outside our language, even outside the mind. Two, the representationalist notion of meaning makes no sense. There is simply no independent test to determine whether something like representation is happening. There is no test which is independent from the very language that representationalism is supposed to explain. And three, there are other accounts of meaning that do not involve us in the first two problems. We will examine one of these accounts, called holism, below. Holism is a notion of meaning in which everything is related to everything else. Nothing comes by itself, serving as a basis for other stuff. Instead, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it so poetically, “Light dawns gradually over the whole.”
Below, we discuss the three problems with representationalism. The first two problems will be discussed quite briefly. The rest of the chapter will be devoted to the third problem with representationalism – the fact that holism is a better, more freeing alternative.
Representationalism Is Alienating
As I mentioned above, I (Greg) was a representationalist for much of my life. I truly believed that words somehow represented the pre-existent objects in the world. The more strongly I believed it, the more I felt separate from the very thing that my words were supposed to represent. I felt cut off from the world of which I was supposedly a part. I felt cut off by the mysterious wall of representation, and separated from the things that existed outside the very language I would use to talk about them.
In fact, this alienation has a lot to do with what Buddhism says about suffering. Buddhism says that suffering comes from the conception of inherent existence. We think that our self and the world exist in an inherent, independent and prescripted way. In this book we cover Buddhism’s account of suffering and the conception of inherent existence in the Introduction and Chapter 2, “Emptiness Teachings in Buddhism.”