8 Freedom from responsibility Agent - neutral consequentialism and the bodhisattva ideal

Is there such a thing as free will in Buddhism? Do moral and mental forms of cultivation at the heart of Buddhist practice imply some notion of agency and responsibility? And if they do, how are we to think of those individuals who embark on the path to liberation or enlightenment, considering that all Buddhists give universal scope to the noself doctrine? Of course, Buddhism is not alone among the world’s great philosophical traditions in providing ample testimony for the possibility of cultivating to a high degree such cardinal virtues as nonviolence, wisdom, compassion, and a general spirit of tolerance. But it is unique among them in articulating a theory of action that, it seems, dispenses altogether with the notion of agent causation. Buddhists pursue what are unmistakably moral ends, but there is no stable self or agent who bears the accumulated responsibility for initiating those pursuits, and seemingly no normative framework against which some dispositions, thoughts, and actions are deemed felicitous, and thus worthy of cultivation, while others are not so deemed. It is not surprising, therefore, to find a near universal lack of agreement among contemporary interpreters about how best to capture the scope of Buddhist ethics using the vocabulary and theoretical frameworks of Western ethical discourse. in seeking an answer to the questions above, the plan, then, is first to show that despite some straightforward metaphysical tenets, the conception of agency in Buddhism is less alien than it may seem at first blush—indeed, it is not unlike conceptions of moral agency that we find in Stoic thought, and more recently in Nietzsche (2006) and several strands of contemporary moral phenomenology; next, to argue for a solution to what is widely regarded as a clear conflict between traditional conceptions of moral agency and the agentneutral metaphysical picture of causality that we glean from Abhidharma literature. Recent accounts (Flanagan 2002; Meyers 2014; Siderits 1987, 2008) seek to resolve this conflict by arguing that the two pictures are compatible because the discourse of ‘persons’ and the discourse of ‘causes’ belong in two distinct and incommensurable domains. Specifically, my claim is that compatibilist solutions compromise the traditional notion of moral responsibility and render ethical conduct indistinguishable from merely pragmatic acts. The main thrust of the compatibilist move is against the notion of 8 Freedom from responsibility Agentneutral consequentialism and the bodhisattva ideal