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Works in Progress

Praise in Śāntideva

Insofar as contemporary western philosophy engages with the thought of the eighth century Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva it concerns his views on anger. This is natural enough, since there is a rich debate about anger in contemporary western philosophy, often connected with blame, where Śāntideva’s remarks can fit. One might be surprised to learn that Śāntideva said at least as much about praise as he did about anger. It is also natural enough that this would not connect with western philosophical discussions of praise. Compared to blame, these discussions are in their infancy. Śāntideva says praise is a hindrance to Buddhist practice and one’s efforts to become a better person, and ultimately a source of suffering. Yet he praises. The text seems to invite us to cultivate a practice of more freely praising others. Praise is bad for us, the audience of the text, but good for others. How can this be? If praise is good, we should want it for ourselves and others. If praise is bad, we should want to avoid it and save others from it. Call this the Śāntidevan puzzle of praise. If praise results in suffering, it seems this should be the suffering a bodhisattva saves others from. So why do they deflect it? And why take delight in others being praised if that is going to result in more suffering? This essay addresses these questions and offers some ways of resolving the puzzle.

“We Accept You, One of Us”: Praise & Blame as a System for Group Management

This paper argues that praise and blame function as a system to manage membership in informal social groups. This is an under-explored feature. Considering this function illuminates both praise and blame. We can be praised into groups, like if you remark on my good taste in music and invite me to have lunch with you. And we can be blamed out of groups, like if I'm rude to your spouse and you stop inviting me to your parties. These can move in the opposite direction as well, with praise removing you from a group and blame drawing you in. These different groups are harder to join or get kicked out of. Call this quality of groups stickiness. If we attend to the way praise and blame shape our social world, we can revisit some old debates about blame with new eyes. For example, this different stickiness of groups is something we should attend to when considering the ethics of praise and blame. The severity of blame and the ways it can manifest should be modulated according to the stickiness of the groups in question. So rather than disputing whether angry blame is always justified or never justified, we can evaluate it in terms of the specific ways blame moves one around in social groups.

Private Praise

In the literature on praise and blame, it is supposed to be an interesting asymmetry that we can blame someone privately but that we can’t praise them privately. The idea that we cannot privately praise is often assumed but rarely argued for. It seems to follow from how we characterize praise as being overtly bestowed and how we talk about praise pretheoretically, as "private praise" is not a familiar notion. On the other hand, it looks like there are situations we would describe as such. Consider Romeo’s soliloquy, "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun." This seems to be praise. Not being heard by Juliet, it also seems private in the relevant sense. This is puzzling. Some attempt to make sense of this by distinguishing praise as a thing that must be done publicly from some other notion like admiration, which Romeo displays. This loses track of the phenomenon of praise. As an alternative, I grant we accept the reality of private praise. I highlight ways this can be done for existing accounts of praise and consider the implications for the symmetry of praise and blame. There may still be asymmetries between praise and blame which justify the ways philosophers have investigate blame while neglecting praise, but private expression is not one of them.

Bodhisattvas and Above Average Agency

Western responsibility theorists tend to employ a binary notion of agency. One is either a free, responsible agent, or one is not. And in some way or another, attributions of responsibility and reactive emotions follow from that. Some theorists develop more subtle views of responsible agency in which one can be more or less agential and thus more or less responsible (i.e. one can be answerable, but not accountable). But even this preserves the sense of the concept as having two fully explored polarities. And importantly, average adults are at the most developed end of this sense of agency. We who make the theories consider people more or less like us to be the pinnacle of human agency. This sense of agency gives rise to interpersonal problems if we treat someone as less agential than they take themself to be. It would be somehow objectionable to treat a responsible adult like a child. But what if there were a sense of agency that stood to adult agency as adult agency stands to the agency of a small child? I suggest we can find such a view implied in Śāntideva’s Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra. Call this above average agency. With appeal to this and related works, we can see how the bodhisattva is depicted in Buddhist philosophy as having an exceptional kind of agency. I argue that we need not read this as being a supernatural power but an accessible skill set. This has the potential to reveal an essential misconception about freedom and human agency as it is discussed in western philosophy: ordinary adults are not as good as it gets. If we hold less agential adults to a lower standard of responsibility, should we hold more agential adults to a higher standard of responsibility?

Anger, Deviance, and Affliction

It seems that anger can confront injustice is by frightening one’s interlocutors into taking one seriously as a moral agent (Reis-Dennis 2019). Call this anger’s shock value. (Insofar as blame is tied up with anger, the same may be true for blame.) This looks appealing for correcting injustice when it works up social hierarchies, like where bosses are scared by the anger of their employees. There are still worries about anger working down those hierarchies (Fricker 2016). But even though anger can be misapplied, still defenders argue that its virtues as a tool to confront injustice outweigh the risks of its misapplication. They argue that anger is so important to our personal and political lives that we should drop the moral and social condemnation of it. I call these people optimists about anger because they think that while some anger is harmful and misled, at least some is fitting, good, or constructive. On the other hand, we have pessimists about anger. For the pessimist, anger is condemned. The problem for shock value is that we can only be shocked by the unexpected, the unfamiliar, and most importantly the disallowed. The aim of this paper is to show that shock value is a problem for both optimists and pessimists about anger. I concede the point that anger has the power to create change in this shocking way. When anger is effective, it is because of its shock value. But shock value comes from defying expectations, violating social or moral norms.  Pessimists morally and socially condemn anger, but they give it the power to be shocking. Optimists morally and socially accept anger, and insofar as they succeed, they diminish its power to be shocking.

Zen, Koans, and Humor

Zen is funny. Zen Buddhist teaching relies on the element of surprise and thus can be seen primarily through the lens of the incongruity theory of humor. Take koans for example. Koans are short teaching stories that are easily remembered but not easily understood. One aspect that makes them easy to remember is that they often involve something unexpected or puzzling. These can involve slapstick humor like the student hitting the teacher with a stick or word play like answering the question “does a dog have Buddha Nature? with “woof!” The contemporary skillful Zen teacher carries on with this method by regularly playing with the polarities of what is supposed to be serious and what is a joke. You ask a serious question and get a seemingly playful answer. You ask what you take to be a playful question and get a very serious answer. This paper explores some of the ways Zen teachers use humor as a pedagogical tool to keep their student’s from becoming too complacent and to shock them into realization.

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