Damien Keown

Karma is not a system of rewards and punishments meted out by God but an impersonal moral law. It is thought to be objective, in the way that scientific laws are objective, but unlike the laws of science the law of karma is not value-free: it embodies a principle of justice which ensures that good actions have good consequences and bad actions bad ones. In this way everyone in the end receives their just deserts.

By freely and repeatedly choosing in certain ways individuals shape their characters, and through their characters their futures.

As the proverb has it: ‘Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny

Thus, Particularism would suggest that while recognizing the importance of general duties (like deontology), good outcomes (like utilitarianism), and self-development (like virtue ethics), Buddhists prize a nuanced sense of judgement (or ‘practical wisdom’) that allows them to act appropriately as circumstances demand.

A Buddhist version of this dilemma might ask whether certain acts are good because they are rewarded by karma, or whether they are rewarded by karma because they are good.

Both teach that life inevitably involves suffering, and that happiness can only be found by cultivating the right mental attitude in the face of adversity

Replacing control with acceptance, according to the Stoics, is the way to achieve the state of happiness known as eudaimonia.

The reader may also recall that in we mentioned that Buddhism expresses its ethical requirements in the form of duties rather than rights. In the West, however, the vocabulary of rights has become the lingua franca of political and ethical discourse, and substantive moral claims are made and defended by appeal to rights. Thus, the abortion debate is commonly framed as a clash between ‘the right to choose’ and ‘the right to life’. Proponents of euthanasia speak of the ‘right to die’, and minority rights are claimed in a plethora of contexts, such as ‘gay’ and ‘transgender’ rights. Some commentators, however, suggest that framing issues in these terms is inappropriate in the case of Buddhism.

He and others worry that laying claim to individual rights conflicts with the Buddhist doctrine of ‘no-self’ (anātman): if there is ultimately no self, the argument goes, then who or what is the bearer of the rights in question? This is a complex issue, but a defender of rights might point out that the doctrine of no-self (anātman) only denies the existence of a transcendental self (ātman), not of a phenomenal, empirical self. It does not deny the existence of human individuals with unique self-shaped identities, and if such identities provide a foundation stable enough for the attribution of duties, as the Buddha clearly believed, presumably they also do for rights.