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BUDDHIST ETHICS: A Review Essay
Author(s) -
Heim Maria
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of religious ethics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.306
H-Index - 20
eISSN - 1467-9795
pISSN - 0384-9694
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9795.2011.00493.x
Subject(s) - morality , buddhism , agency (philosophy) , moral agency , epistemology , sociology , context (archaeology) , normative ethics , moral disengagement , field (mathematics) , environmental ethics , moral psychology , philosophy , paleontology , theology , biology , mathematics , pure mathematics
I argue that three recent studies ( Imagining the Life Course , by Nancy Eberhardt; Sensory Biographies , by Robert Desjarlais; and How to Behave , by Anne Hansen) advance the field of Buddhist Ethics in the direction of the empirical study of morality. I situate their work within a larger context of moral anthropology, that is, the study of human nature in its limits and capacities for moral agency. Each of these books offers a finely grained account of particular and local Buddhist ways of interpreting human life and morality, and each explores complex conceptions of moral agency. I suggest that these three studies share similar interests in moral psychology, the human being across time, the intersubjective dimensions of moral experience, and what life within a karmic framework looks like. I propose that their contributions offer some of the most refreshing and interesting work generated in Buddhist ethics in the last decade.