Graham Priest
speaker
386 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2020
last heard Mar 2020
Graham Priest’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
not prudential.
And the question is how do you understand that?
And probably the greatest Buddhist ethicist was a man called Shantideva, who's working in about the eighth century in India, who writes a long tract on this.
And like most ancient texts, people argue about how you interpret it.
However, the thought is something like this, hey, look,
Suffering is bad.
Okay?
And the badness of it does not depend on whose suffering it is.
I mean, in a sense, you know, the question of who is bit of a chimera anyway, because there's no self that experiences of suffering, they're just kind of experiences of suffering, and suffering is bad.
So if it's bad you want to get rid of those experiences and who they belong to are kind of irrelevant.
So I I think that's a kind of a very standard Buddhist justification for this.
Well, um I think this starts by taking us back to Henry's question.
I mean, um what I call the zeroth noble truth.
Okay.
The zeroth noble truth is that suffering is bad.
And even if you think that that's not universally true, it's a pretty good guide to life, right?
And then there's why why not just my suffering, why other people's?
Well that's the kind of suffering is bad, period, it doesn't matter whose it is.
Okay, so once that's on the table, then it's clear that compassion is a port an important ethical virtue and so you want a society which is as compassionate as possible, and certainly not one which goes around inflicting gratuitous suffering on people.
So that raises the question of how do you well what
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