Buddhist Case Law on Theft

Attitudes to Euthanasia in the

The prohibition on taking human life is one of the cornerstones of Buddhist ethics, but there is often confusion about the interpretation of this prohibition in different contexts. In his commentary on the third pàràjika in the Samantapàsàdikà, Buddhaghosa sets out to clarify the legal provisions of the monastic precept against taking life. The root text and his comments on it are relevant to t...

A case control study: White-collar defendants compared with defendants charged with other nonviolent theft.

We examined the clinical, criminal, and sociodemographic characteristics of all white-collar crime defendants referred to the evaluation unit of a state center for forensic psychiatry. With 29,310 evaluations in a 12-year period, we found 70 defendants charged with embezzlement, 3 with health care fraud, and no other white-collar defendants (based on the eight crimes widely accepted as white-co...

Islamic Law and the Crime of Theft

Rethinking Mind-body Dualism: a Buddhist Take on the Mind- Body Problem

This paper is an effort to present the mind-body problem from a Buddhist point of view. Firstly, I show that the Buddhist distinction between mind and body is not absolute, but instead merely employed as a communicative tool to aid the understanding of human beings in a holistic light. Since Buddhism acknowledges a mind-body distinction only on a conventional level, it would not be fair to clai...

The Importance of Being Honest*

Given individual propensities to cheat (stealing, overcharging, etc.), the optimality conditions for the amount of resources devoted to law enforcement and for the severity o f penalties on convicted cheats are derived. In some interesting cases, the optimal penalty equals the market price divided by the probability of conviction and it is optimal to spend very little on enforcement and impose ...