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Constituting the Other: The Conventional Identity of Persons

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A Buddhist Theory of Killing

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Abstract

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This chapter is a brief transitional discussion between the universal Buddhist-metaphysical features of personhood relevant to generic features of killing (such as volition, psychophysical constitution, and the causal relations between trope-particulars) and more specifically constituted features of personhood that determine distinct intentional classes of, and reasons for, killing. It deepens the claims of Chap. 7, as a preliminary to their engagement in the argument of Chaps. 10 through to 13, and entails a transition from the broader religious concerns of Buddhist soteriology, to this-worldly conceptions of criterial norms and values for the rational evaluation of acts. The argument thus turns to the social-cognitive construction of persons qua propertied persons: that understanding of persons prompting rational claims for the justification of intentional acts. These preconditions involve socioculturally-specific claims about persons, and how they are represented by cognitive agents depending on their interests. This introduces the problematic of the a/symmetrical representation of intentional content as an intersubjective field of contesting claims about persons as such, the evaluation of their imputed properties, and the normative status of claims concerning them. Having established this background for the predication of persons as pertaining to one or another class of persons as apt for killing, these can be summarised in four generic classes: as apt for lethal punishment, for the lethal termination of suffering, for the representation of symbolic (ideological, religious, political) identity attacked in lethal acts, and as the literal objects of lethal self-defence.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Thematized in Chap. 7, Sect. 2.1 in the ontogenetic model of the person.

  2. 2.

    This condition of reification is again addressed with respect to Buddhist and other cases in Chap. 12, below.

  3. 3.

    Even in dependence on that source an unlikely case is at best assumed for the sub-bestial moral depravity of all Communists merely in virtue of being Communist (which assumption amounts to a travesty of the kammic intuition of embodied virtue). Moreover, if an ignorant worldling is not qualified to infallibly distinguish the genuinely irredeemable icchāntika from the morally-depraved but still reformable agent, what authorizes their permissible homicide?

  4. 4.

    At least since the demise of the Pudgalavāda school, but that historical point is orthogonal to the present discussion.

  5. 5.

    Relevant to arguments for and against many cases of abortion, and pertaining to the discussion of Chap. 11.

  6. 6.

    As noted in Kovan (2018), Śrāvakayāna Buddhism makes the transcendence of personal suffering, even despite states of pain, a sure sign of spiritual accomplishment. The Milindapañha (44–5) “insists that terminally-ill arhats do not suicide because they are indifferent to both the pain of continued life and the putative pleasure of release from it in death.” (637, n. 4) However inherently undesirable, pain in this context provides a basis for transcending, rather than guaranteeing, states of suffering.

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  1. Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Martin Kovan

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  1. Martin Kovan
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Kovan, M. (2022). Constituting the Other: The Conventional Identity of Persons. In: A Buddhist Theory of Killing. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_9

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