The first of the Four Noble Truths handed down by the Buddha is dukkha, roughly translated into english as “suffering”. In the Buddhist view, when reality is seen correctly, a practitioner will understand the inescapable nature of suffering or “dissatisfactoriness” in life. Knowing that suffering is inescapable is a step towards nirvana and out of suffering.
M. Scott Peck illustrates the acceptance of suffering well:
“Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.” – M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
It isn’t hard to observe this truth. Going for a walk in the forest reveals a menagerie of bugs and plants killing each other for food and survival. There does not seem to be an implicit “good” or “bad” in nature – a nature we humans are a product of. Why then, should we be good at all? Pondering this, I came across Beyond Bumper Sticker Ethics by Steve Wilkens. It provides a refreshingly approachable overview of ethical systems, their history, and how they attempt to answer what it means to be “good” and why we ought to.
Most of the systems covered attempt to create a universal foundation for ethics based on human reason. However, “reason systems” cannot answer well for all situations. There’s usually a paradox lurking somewhere. Kant’s Categorical Imperative implores you to act only in a way that the action should become a universal law. This means you cannot lie to save someone’s life, as most would agree “Do not lie” should be universally adopted.
Transcendentalist views try to address the flaws of reason – either disregarding or qualifying reason with another basis for human motivation such as love or the reception of divine information. These efforts however, tend to devolve into a kind of relativism. After all, who can define “love” in a universally accepted way?
Wilkens makes a good case for why it’s worth erecting an ethics out of nature’s ambiguity, even if that ethics is inescapably human:
“The language system our minds use to process information seems to match, in some way, the language of the natural world so that the data received is understood. Without some form of compatibility between the logical structure of our mind and the logic of the universe, it would be impossible for us to know anything about the world outside our mind…the assumption that our ideas correlate with what is “out there” is a common intuition.”
The fact we have a cognition which can navigate and approximate an understanding of reality means we probably can and should create an ethics which itself is consistent with, and a part of nature. Wilkens points out the obvious danger in seeking out a truth for how we ought to behave, paraphrasing Karl Barth’s criticisms of Thomas Aquainas’s spiritual reason,
“We do not discover God; we create a god. And what we have created becomes an idol, an object of worship. And because we are busy worshiping the god created with our reason, we close ourselves off to the real God.”
To say the means by which we can discern the truth can be the same means by which we can obscure it nothing new here. But Wilkens indicates why this process of discernment is still worth it:
“Even though I have not endorsed any specific position here, there are a number of indications that rather than giving up hope that some sort of ethical truth can be discovered, the entire process of inquiry assumes that truth is possible.”
We are made better by the process. Better off than we have been had we never tried at all. “Better” may need a direct definition and so is the case with “good”. But we may at the very least ask ourselves what we believe “good” to be and revise it when confronted with more convincing ideas.
In light of suffering and it’s reality in our lives, the choice to improve and become, as Thomas Aquinas would say, “All that we can be” is in fact a rational one.