Representational Persons: Identity as the Object of Killing

Abstract

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This chapter turns to a penultimate intentional class of killing which takes persons as representations of comparatively abstract or symbolic (religious, ethnic, political, ideological) identity, and so worthy of attack. It analyses the metaphysical and cognitive differences between this and prior classes of killing, and how these make it as an intentional act prey to ontological illusion and cognitive error. Buddhist arguments account for these epistemic, as well as normative, failures of justification. Nonetheless, that Buddhist critique has to concede the bare efficacy of ‘representational killing’ (RK) as a causal operator, despite its failing Buddhist justification, thus introducing the distinction between conventionally true justification, in a Buddhist-epistemic register, and conventional worldly practice, in an extra-Buddhist one. Yet this concession to the sociohistorical convention of killing (as RK) as a practice for resolving conflict is seen to also fail a larger Buddhist telos of civilisational progress: the difference between a more or less enlightened human order. In this case, universal human rights are construed, in a Buddhist sense, as based on the dignity of persons not by virtue of deontological reasoning but rather the universal compassion of Buddhist philosophical ethics. Only an ethics of rights which registers the normative dimension of cognitive insight along with compassionate affect, is able to undermine the kind of pervasive reification of persons that gives rise, on a depth-psychological level, to the ongoing possibility of representational killing—a problem which obtains as much in the Buddhist, as the non-Buddhist, lifeworld.