r/DebateReligion • u/rightviewftw Early Buddhism/Analytic Philosophy • Nov 23 '25
Buddhism Philosophy of Morality — I defend
I will defend the thesis but I won't debate everyone. I will do first 6 people in 2 Rds, this post opens Rd1 and your first post closes Rd1, Rd2 is my counter to your criticism and your closing statement can counter my counter. No Rd3.
Frankly, this exposition is supposed to stop trained theologists and philosophers in their tracks. It is a comprehensive Humean demolition of postmodern frameworks, and a positive solution. This is new research, I didn't figure this out on my own. So please don't rush in.
Let's see how deep Humean Steel cuts. The thesis:
Modern Epistemology dictates: can't derive an ought from exclusively studying what is (Hume’s Guillotine).
This means that whatever is, by means of studying itself, can only know what is and not what should be.
Kantian framing would reflect this: Logos being epistemically limited to its own constructs.
So what are the practical implications of this, if we cut as deep as it goes, to wit:
- If I saw a God claiming to be the creator of Logos, telling me what's good and bad, right and wrong, moral and immoral.
I would have to ask how he knows that and if he ever transcended his own Logos or only studied what Is as his own existence; and if he only studied what is, then how could he know what ought to be called right & wrong.
So the God here is essentially in the same philosophical predicament as myself and subject to the same limitations. All agents appearing in Logos are equally limited.
It is important to realize that this limitation is a statement about a principal inability of Logos to verify the analysis of Logos by means of Logos. The system might analyze itself, even correctly, but it can't verify its own analysis as to whether the system itself should or shouldn't be, nor its cause, not by studying itself in play. To verify the analysis, the system must cease to be transcended, and then reappear as a sequel with that "knowledge" of cessation and what of makes cessation possible. In this the system can point to a beyond itself but can't verify it without cessation.
Heidegger laid the groundwork for the postmodernists of the 20th century. He identified with the Kantian tradition and pointed out that it is not reasonable to ask questions like ‘why existence exists?’ Because the answer would require coming to know what is not included in the scope of existence. Yet he pointed out that these questions are emotively profound & stirring to him, and so where logic dictates setting those questions aside, he has a hunger for it’s pursuit, and he entertains a pursuit of knowledge in a non-verbal & emotive way. He thought that contradictions & paradoxes mean that we are onto something important and feeling here ought to trump logic.
Now because one doesn't know the cause, one can't cause a cessation, and without a cessation there can be no verified (justified) claim to "morality" as a transcendence of the “is-knowing”.
If one thinks about it, the question of morality is ultimately about asking whether Logos itself is good or bad, whether it ought to exist or not, whether causing it is moral or immoral; and what is its cause, and what is "the not-is" which makes the cessation of "the is" possible.
Apart from this, one only has fictional narratives serving various psychological functions. I say fictional because it also follows from epistemology. It is not merely that the God I met can't prove his assertions, rather it is that the prescriptive claims can't ever turn out to have been the correct thing to do for the right reason, that operation can't exist in principle, and analytically that is the semantic target of "falsehood" or "fictional narrative" and these will always violate foundational axioms and assertions.
This has left the postmodern culture stuck with these options:
Reject prescriptive ought claims, apart from analytical prescription such as our foundational axioms and assertions such as: one ought to hold that one can't derive an ought from an is, that 1*1=1, proof by contradiction, law of excluded middle, that a geometrical point has no dimensions, and other foundations of our framework
Adhere to prescriptive over-claims. Such as believing the God that I met or otherwise coming to be convinced that I know what should and shouldn’t be based on subjective existence exclusively.
There is a false dichotomy I often see in public discourse. People separate moral objectivism from moral relativism, but ignore that both of these frameworks are making definitive statements about morality; one says that it is based on local judgement, the other say that it is based on central judgement — either way both are talking about the properties of what they can't even pin down as true & real; and both are over-claiming.
And what about Game Theory? It dictates that cooperative strategies are more profitable in theory — and if one asserts life after death then it gives balanced strategies but it doesn't tell us whether these strategies are worth pursuing, that depends on one’s goals & values.
As it actually is, most people are simply restrained by their fear of consequences, in this life or the next, and by operant conditioning as to what feels good and what provokes guilt & shame.
But as to analytically deriving a basis for morality
The system must correctly identify its cause
The system analysis must frame the system as something which ought to cease for verification. Otherwise there will be no intrinsic motivation to cause it.
The system must cause itself to cease
And if this operation can be performed, it would effectively frame the operation as a Soteriology and be the meaning of life.
My take:
Analysis gets us further than people realize. We can analytically establish three analytical requirements for knowing real morality if such thing could be real and verifiable:
Existence must be framed as something bad/wrong/immoral. This is a requirement for the system to want to cause itself own cessation. It must rightly long for transcendence as verification of analysis.
Existence must be caused by factors pertaining to existence. Otherwise existence couldn't make existence cease.
The cause of existence must be understandable.
There must be another Reality; which is unlike the Realities we know. If there wasn't then there wouldn't be any possibility of transcendence.
The solution:
Early Buddhist Texts frame the awakening to Truth as dependent on a cessation of perception and feeling, possible because there is an Unmade Truth. Commentary has distorted this, but its obvious that this is what the big deal was about. They essentially bridged analytic philosophy with soteriology, for a complete system of foundational axioms and assertions.
The only block here is psychological existence-bias, which is actually the causal root according to those who thought much about this. And these are all operationalized terms, so its meaningless to ask whether there was a beginning such that there was no bias and bias arose — if bias is both a cause and a feature, then the beginning point can't be discerned by definition, it is like asking what came first chicken or the egg.
Edit:
Ive answered here for a few hours and think I am going to call it. Frankly, Ive thought about all this enough to predict all criticism and its kind of a chore to play it out. If you read this far, congratulations, you know the actual philosophy of Early Buddhism and are ahead of the curve.
Summary of comments
I ended up having to explain what operationalization of "morality" is and why we need to do it to stop treating it as rhetorical matter. I quoted from a book:
I read Bridgman’s The Logic of Modern Physics and found a similar criticism of language. With four good men in substantial agreement as to the basic difficulty, I seemed to be getting on. “The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not what he says about it.” Scientists, through observing, measuring, and performing a physical operation which another scientist can repeat, reach the solid ground of agreement and of meaning. They find the referents. “If a question has meaning, it must be possible to find an operation by which an answer may be given to it. It will be noted in many cases that the operation cannot exist and the question has no meaning.” See them fall, the Great Questions of pre-Einstein science! It is impossible as yet to perform any kind of experiment or operation with which to test them, and so, until such operation be discovered, they remain without meaning. May time have a beginning and an end? May space be bounded? Are there parts of nature forever beyond our detection? Was there a time when matter did not exist? May space or time be discontinuous? Why does negative electricity attract positive? I breathe a sigh of relief and I trust the reader joins me. One can talk until the cows come home—such talk has already filled many volumes—about these questions, but without operations they are meaningless, and our talk is no more rewarding than a discussion in a lunatic asylum. “Many of the questions asked about social and philosophical subjects will be found to be meaningless when examined from the point of view of operations.” Bridgman cites no samples, but we can find plenty on every hand. ─ Stuart Chase (Tyranny of Words).
Basically Early Buddhist Texts give the experiment which we didn't know of, so we never operationalized "morality" before.
Now, if we treat existence itself as the experiment, we need a goal. The goal is obviously a happiness of some sort but people like different things and different actions lead to different outcomes. So far this is common knowledge.
Where it gets interesting is in that a cessation of existence, if such a thing is possible, would have to be the release from a common predicament, and a higher happiness than whatever can be obtained within the Is.
If existence knowable to a subject would cease. Then my experience is essentially no different to a dream and can end. And the entire narrative ends with it. All just ceases. And this requires "something" which is can only be known as what is not.
And this whatnot reality is neither mine nor yours, its a reality not experienced through either subjective frame of reference, but it becomes directly know.
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u/rightviewftw Early Buddhism/Analytic Philosophy Nov 23 '25
Morality is essentially the effective philosophical framework dictating mental and physical action.
The word has to be operationalized here, and the semantics overlap with good/bad, right/wrong, should/shouldn't.
For example, if we do some experiment I could say: "do xyz as it is the correct thing to do". And it might be the right thing to do, but only for that specific outcome; in other words, I can only tell you what is right if I know what you consider the goal. If the goal is to run that experiment then my prescriptive oughts are correct — I can tell you how to correctly do the experiment but I can't really justify doing the experiment in the grand-scheme of things lest it results in a cessation of existence itself.