Buddhism, Normativity, and Leadership
There is a story of one of the past lives of Buddha. He is travelling and comes upon some bandits. He deliberates on what to do and ends up killing them. He rationalizes this by saying that he is ending their ability to accrue bad karma by the continued act of thievery. In a sense, he seems to be acting in the name of Karma, but in doing so, he recognizes that his killing is itself a "bad" act and thus he will aquire bad Karma because of it. It almost seems sacrificial, like he is taking their bad Karma upon himself...
John Stuart Mill comes to mind. I took a philosophy course on him last semester, brilliant guy. He believes in the principle of utilitarianism, but his util. is quite nuanced and different than the common understanding of util.
JS Mill believes that the ultimate principle is that what is good and right is what promotes the well-being of all. But Mill also believes in secondary principles that have been derived from the ultimate and often give more efficient and effective guidance on the good/right thing to do in the day to day.
I believe "thou shall not kill", "when slapped, turn the other cheek" and other such tenets of many religions and moralities are basically secondary principles that should be followed most of the time. However, this does not mean that one should never strike out against wrong doers. In the story of the Budda, I believe Budda contemplated the situation and decided after some deliberation that instead of following the secondary principles he would go against "thou shall not kill" and kill the bandits in the name of some more ultimate principle, maybe the good of all.
I wonder though, what was his deliberation process? How long must one think about such things before they decide to go against secondary principles? Mill believed that secondary principles were important because if people were always attempting to base their actions off of the ultimate principle, they could sometimes talk themselves into doing something terrible. For example, Hitler probably believed he was doing good. He deliberated and decided that some had to perish for the greater good of humanity. I believe he was wrong and it seems like most people agree.
However, I have to wonder, what if Budda didn't stand up to the bandits: what if the world didn't stand up to hitler. We can't know what would have happened. I sometimes wonder, if i could go back in time, would i end hitler's life before he ever got to power, before he started his evil work? But then i think, maybe having hitler get as far as he did was important for the world. If the holocaust had never happened would we be as sensitive to genocide as we are today? Maybe if it wasn't hitler in the 40s, it would have been someone else in the 50s, and maybe they would have killed more.
In general, I believe kind of what I said yesterday, that it all comes back to equilibrium at some point. That if Budda hadn't killed the bandits when he did, they probably would have gone on with what they were doing, creating more and more evil, but then they would have gotten more cocky, and fallen prey to someone else. Or maybe they would have been so successful that they were no longer in poverty, could start their own village and raise their children on agriculture and purity so that they wouldn't have to live the tainted lives of their parents.
thinking about leaders, I think what makes someone a leader is making tough decisions. Often it seems like decisions must be made between two good but different options, or picking the "lesser of two evils". I think every decision can have good and bad consequences, or maybe those are stupid words and no decisions have any necessary consequences and everything is subjective...but anyway, decisions have to be made, we can't be frozen in deliberation all our lives trying to ferret out all the potential goods and evils that could come of our decisions, so i think a leader is someone who has the confidence/decisiveness/power-of-self-belief/something that allows them to say "i have deliberated enough, and now I must act"
with so many tough decisions in the world, maybe we need more leaders. I also see a lot of rash, not well thought out actions being done, so maybe we need people that are slightly less sure of themselves...
inaction can be a powerful act
