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Outline of Talk
The role of culture and religion in bioethics
Buddhist viewpoints on a number of issues
Life and death
Genetic modification of organisms
Global justice
Bioethics and Culture
This will be the main topic for my other talk.
However, one should start with consideration of the issue, since bioethics concerns questions of value, which are naturally related with how cultures shape attitudes and value judgments of a people.
Buddhism
Buddhism is the main religion of the people in many countries in SE Asia, China, Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.The main goal of the Buddhist is to become liberated from the cycle of samsara, the process of becoming born, dying and being born again.According to Buddhism, this process continues for an individual because he or she does not see the truth as it is in itself—that things do not have inherent existence and look as they are only because one is attached to certain false views.
Buddhism
Liberation is possible when the individual sees through this illusion and acknowledges the truth as it really is. Thus he or she is freed from ‘defilements’, i.e., mental traits such as greed, anger and delusion, that result from ego formation, and it is this ego formation that compels the individual to go through the process over and over.
Buddhism
The state of being liberated is called ‘nirvana’. Literally the word is ‘being extinguished.’The entire corpus of the Buddhist teaching can be summed up as follows:
Do what is good.Avoid what is evil.Practice so that the mind is clear.
Buddhism and Ethics
Naturally Buddhism has a lot to say about ethics.
The first two teachings alluded to above deal directly with ethics.
However, it is always contentious to judge what kind of action is good or bad, and this is especially the case in the contemporary world where advances in science and technology have complicated the picture tremendously.
Buddhist Ethics
In Buddhism there seems to be a key toward understanding which action is right or virtuous, or the opposite—one needs to discern what kind of consequences that action will bring.
Hence it appears that Buddhist ethics is a kind of consequentialism. This is understandable since what is valuable is judged as whether it will bring about the main result, nirvana, or not.
Buddhist Ethics
Even so, however, one still needs to find one’s way, especially with regards to questions in ethics of science and technology, because actually it is not the actions themselves that will bring about the Main Goal; rather it is the quality of the mind of the one who is making the decision that is at issue.
Buddhist Ethics
Thus there is no necessary conflict between Buddhist ethics and the secular brand of ethics popular in the West nowadays.One still needs reasoning and deliberation among members of one’s groups and communities to find out the optimal course of action in these issues. One cannot just take a passage from the Canon and pronounce that this is what Buddhism says regarding issues such as GMOs or abortion or others.
Specific Issues: Life and Death
Be that as it may, Buddhism can also give general guidelines to the specific ethical issues that are being debated today.
Let’s start with the issues of life and death, especially cloning and death criteria for transplantation purposes.
Cloning
My colleague Somparn Promta has written a number of works dealing with the Buddhist attitude toward cloning of mammals.
His idea is that Buddhism does not have an objection in principle to either therapeutic or reproductive cloning, the reason being that these are the technologies that facilitate giving birth and hence are unobjectionable.
Cloning
According to him, the moral objections to cloning do not hold their ground in Buddhism because they hold false presuppositions.
For example, the objection that cloning is wrong because it means humans are playing God is not accepted because in Buddhism there is no God. (Actually there are gods, but they are not given much respect.)
Reproductive Cloning
According to Somparn, Buddhism has little against reproductive cloning, since it is aimed at producing a human being, not killing it.
However, when the process involves a lot of killing (as when many embryos have to be destroyed), the process can become objectionable.
Therapeutic Cloning
The case for therapeutic cloning is a little different. Here intentional ‘killing’ of embryos are involved.
But Somparn has the idea of distinguishing the ‘individual’ and the ‘social’ aspect of Buddhist ethics. An action may be wrong according to the first regard, but may be acceptable according to the second.
Abortion
At present Thai law does not allow free abortion. Abortion can only be performed when the mother has been raped and keeping the baby would fatally harm the mother.
There have been calls for expanding the restriction so that the mental health of the mother is included too.
Abortion
The rather severe injunction against abortion presumably comes from the Buddhist belief in the sanctity of life and its prohibition of killing in general.
A result is that there are more than hundreds of thousand of cases of illegal abortions each year, and reports of mothers abandoning or killing their babies have become commonplace in the media.
End of Life
Buddhism pays special attention to death and dying.
As for the question of death criteria, Buddhism in general holds that someone is dead when he or she stops breathing.
So the brain-death criterion is something new for the Buddhist to think about.
Brain Death
The key question is whether the consciousness (vijnana) has left the body for good or not.This can be translated as whether the death of the brain is reversible or not.More problem ensues when the criterion becomes the death of higher brain, not the whole of the brain.In that case, has consciousness gone from the body for good?
Organ Transplantation
Is selling one’s own bodily parts objectionable according to Buddhism?
There are stories of bodhisattvas (those who are intent on becoming the Buddha and to help sentient beings) intentionally giving their flesh to a hungry lioness who has to feed her cubs but is to weak to hunt.
Genetic Modification of Organism
One of basic arguments against GMO is that it violates the course of nature.But according to Buddhism nothing is unnatural, and in fact the Canon has stories about magicians transforming life forms into many strange shapes, and there was nothing particularly wrong about such action.So it can be inferred that Buddhism has nothing in principle against genetic modification of organisms.
GMOs
What could be wrong, on the other hand, is that in many instances producing GMOs is motivated not through altruistic attitude to help mankind, but to gain profit and power over food producers.Thus the motive becomes greed rather than altruism, and as such the action becomes unwholesome.Perhaps this can be rectified if the developers of GM technologies and the traditional food producers and consumers deliberate together without one side being disadvantaged as to the real benefits and the course of action society should take on this issue.
Global Justice
Many contentious issues surrounding GMOs involve the lack of balance in power between the large multinational corporations and the poor farmers in developing countries.
This brings in the topic of global justice: How can global justice be assured in the case of production, distribution and utilization of GM technology worldwide? And what can Buddhism contribute to this?
Socially Engaged Buddhism
Recently a growing number of Buddhists have come to see that the way the religion is being practiced in their own societies contributed little to social activism because it paid too much emphasis on individual liberation and esoteric rituals. So they formed themselves and tried to introduce another way of practicing that could lead directly to concrete changes in society.
Social Engaged Buddhism and Global Justice
So it is conceivable that this kind of Buddhism might contribute quite a lot to the quest for global justice.
First of all, the GMO issue has become one of global justice because it is much involved with equality (or lack thereof) among the nations of the world.