Buddhist Charity

Charity ratings

How do charitable donors respond to the third party ratings that signal the quality of charities? I investigate this question using a novel data set from Charity Navigator which provides quality ratings for 5400 charities. Since Charity Navigator prominently displays a charity’s star rating which is assigned based on its overall rating, one can identify the causal impact of a one star increase ...

17 Buddhist Bioethics

Describing anything as ‘Buddhist’, including in this case a distinctively Buddhist bioethics, is fundamentally problematic from both a historic and Buddhist point of view. Historically, the Buddhist tradition has evolved in dozens of countries for 2500 years, with no one tradition having clear doctrinal authority over the others. Internally, even if a common Buddhist ethics was implicit in the ...

Portraits of Buddhist Women

Journal of Buddhist Ethics

I argue that central Buddhist tenets and meditation methodology support a view of free will similar to Harry Frankfurt’s optimistic view and contrary to Galen Strawson’s pessimistic view. For Frankfurt, free will involves a relationship between actions, volitions, and “metavolitions” (volitions about volitions): simplifying greatly, volitional actions are free if the agent approves of them. For...

Charity and context

«Though truth and falsehood bee Neare twins, yet truth a little older is.» I Much of the contribution of contemporary philosophy to the problem of interpretation in anthropology is not a contribution to anthropology, but to what might be called a priori anthropology (Cooper 1986). This is an armchair speculation, far from the field, about the general requirements of the interpretation of belief...