PHILOS 2120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Egalitarianism, Gautama Buddha, Consequentialism
4 Mar 2019
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Buddhist ethics: the story of great compassionate. Catches a stowaway/assassin, who intends to murder 500 merchants to get their wealth. Stop it: kill the stowaway, tell the crew and have them kill him. If great compassionate kill the stowaway, he will suffer in hell for 10,000 eonns. That course of action is the best option from a selfless perspective: protects the stowaway from all the bad consequences of his murders, protects the crew from the bad consequences of killing in anger as a mob. Puzzle: it looks like great compassionate faces a tragic moral dilemma. The tragic dilemma is when one is faced with a range of options, all of which are morally bad. Example: a man becomes engaged to multiple women: the monk who carried the women. The general rule of a monastic life is not to touch women. But, in this circumstance, following that rule would bring about bad consequences.
