It would be difficult to point to a more central goal of Buddhist meditation practice than the cultivation of one’s moral capacity. Buddhist texts, especially those from the Pāḷi cannon, emphasize the cultivation of mindfulness as leading to unwavering moral motivation to avoid acts that are “unskillful.” The cultivation of compassion is a hallmark of Mahāyāna Buddhist meditation. The psychological and physiological changes involved in such meditative practices are the subject of a growing number of empirical studies. Recent studies of long-term practitioners of mindfulness meditation have begun to make significant contributions to our current understanding of neural plasticity, attention, and consciousness. This panel will examine the cognitive science of meditation and moral motivation. Can meditation affect the short-term psychological states or long-term character traits that motivate pro-social actions? How have various Buddhist traditions explained the relation between attention, emotion, and virtuous action, and what light can be shed by modern science?
Panelists
Willoughby Britton (Brown University)
Jake Davis (CUNY Graduate Center)
Andrew Olendzki (Barre Center for Buddhist Studies)
Jesse Prinz (CUNY Graduate Center)
Moderator
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke University)
For David Pizzaro:
Two questions.
1. I asked a similar question of Walter Sinnitt-Armstrong, but a version of it applies also to your research. I am not at all detracting from the fact that your fascinating research seems to strongly support the empirical prediction of Peter Strawson, in his famous essay on "Freedom and Resentment", to the effect that the publicized truth of determinism would not disrupt conventional normative institutions and practices that are presumably logically undermined by the truth of that thesis. Nonetheless, what remains puzzling to me is whether you think this has any important metaethical conclusions for philosophers interested in whether determinism actually does logically undermine not our normative institutions and practices, per se, but the validity or truth of the normative claims that such institutions and practices may or may not rest on. It is one thing to show that an actual normative behavior or practice is not actually psychologically, causally or rationally dependent on the validity or truth of a claim, but it is another thing to show that a morally valid behavior or practice is not rationally dependent on a morally valid claim. In other words, if it could be shown, for example, that the majority of humans were manipulated through fear of consequences and expectation of rewards to engage in what they then (rationalizing to themselves) thought were practices supported by deontological reasons, would that undermine the validity of the claim that, say, for behaviors or practices to be morally valid they must be supported by deontogological (or utilitarian, etc.) reasons? In this case, your research shows that many normative behaviors appear to be rationalized post facto. Sad, but apparently true. The somewhat open question remains: Ought they to be?
2. Your research seems to show that folks treat the need to blame as primary and that they invent rationalizations for the blame, once attributed, along lines of attributions of some sort of autonomy. What do you make of the claim that this research inadvertently shows that we actually do presuppose that moral responsibility requires the ability of an agent to control his/her actions, so much so that when we interpret a case as warranting blame, we then intuitively "fill in" the attirbutions of autonomy?
Posted by: Rick Repetti | 10/08/2011 at 10:33 PM