Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

if we are trying to make up our minds about the nature of the self; but if we are trying to understand what is going on in the chapter we have been reading, perhaps not. Remember that this is a branch of the tradition that gave us the guru, the authoritative spiritual teacher. In Nagasena’s eyes the authority for what he was saying would ultimately be the word of the Buddha; his own business is to convey the right doctrine in lively and memorable terms. The demand for compelling logic is best reserved for a writer like Hume, to whom it is appropriate because he is genuinely trying to meet it.
Some readers may feel a nagging worry. Buddhists, just as much as Hindus, believe in rebirth—the present Dalai Lama is his predecessor, reborn. But if there is no self beyond the five ‘aggregates’, what is there to be reborn, what is it that migrates from one body to the next? How did they reconcile these two doctrines? All I can say here is that they were fully aware of the problem. It leads to a lot more Buddhist metaphysics, which our all too brief tour can’t even make a start on. But if you have in your hand the edition of Questions of King Milinda recommended in the References, turn to pp. 58–9 and read the section entitled ‘Transmigration and Rebirth’—just to begin to get the flavour.

Chapter 5 Some themes
The three examples we have been looking at touch on a number of general themes, ideas whose significance goes well beyond that of any single text or for that matter any single school or period. Now I shall pick half a dozen of them out for special attention. To what extent a question can legitimately be considered in abstraction from the particular historical contexts in which it was raised and (perhaps) answered is itself a philosophical question, and no simple one; I shall say something about it in the closing section of the chapter.Ethical consequentialism
Don’t be frightened by the heading. It is just the trade name of the doctrine that how good or bad something is has to be judged by looking at its consequences. In Crito, as we saw, Socrates was weighing the consequences of the actions open to him, the results for his friends, his children, himself. But there were also considerations about what had happened in the past, not what would result in the future: his past behaviour meant that he now had a duty to the State, which required him to accept its judgement and punishment. I suggested at the end of that chapter that if philosophers were going to solve our moral problems they were first going to have to convince us that moral matters are really less complicated than they appear to be. One such attempt is consequentialism: no moral reasons are backward-looking; proper moral reasons all look to the consequences of our actions.
So the idea is that something is good if it has good consequences, bad if it has bad ones. But, you will immediately notice, that doesn’t tell us much; we still need to be told which consequences are good ones, which are bad ones. Just repeating the formula (saying: consequences are good when they themselves have good consequences) gets us no further. A consequentialist must be willing to recommend certain things, or states of affairs, as being good in themselves. In their case, goodness does not consist in having good consequences—they just are good. Other things are good only to the extent that they lead to them—the things that are good in themselves.
That means that consequentialism isn’t any single ethical doctrine, but a general type of doctrine which can take very different specific forms depending on what is held to be good in itself. If you think that the only thing good in itself is pleasure you will live very differently from someone who thinks that the only thing good in itself is knowledge. So even if we could all agree to be consequentialist in our ethical thinking, very little would have been settled.
You might now wonder why we should be so exclusive: why can’t lots of different things be good in themselves: pleasure, knowledge, beauty, love—just for starters? That sounds very reasonable. But if what we were hoping for was a moral theory that would make it fairly simple for us to decide what we ought to do, then it is a big step in the wrong direction. Once we agree to take more than one basic value into account we will inevitably find that our values sometimes come into conflict. I might quite often be in a position to promote one value (i.e. do things which have that sort of consequence) or another, but not both. Which should I choose? If Socrates had had to choose between risking his friends’ lives and damaging his children’s education, which should he have chosen? How lucky for him that he didn’t! What an advantage if we could settle on just one basic value, and measure everything else by the extent to which it leads to that one thing.
No surprise, then, that there have been ethical theories of just that kind. An early one, well worth reading about, is that of Epicurus (341–271 bc). For him and his followers, the one and only thing valuable in itself was pleasure. But don’t expect him to recommend orgies and banquets interspersed with periods of relaxation on the beach of your private island. Because what Epicurus meant by pleasure was not that at all: it was absence of pain, both physical and mental. This completely untroubled state, he thought, was as great a pleasure as any. What we immediately think of as pleasures are just different, not more pleasant. This point, and his advice on how to achieve and maintain the ideal state, he appears to have argued for with subtlety and wisdom. I say ‘appears’, because we have very little from his own hand; although