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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
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    The objection that karma across lives requires a transmig... — Carmelics
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    Home/Moral Responsibility
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    The objection that karma across lives requires a transmigrating self to justify desert can be resolved by rejecting the assumption that persons are ultimately real entities that bear moral properties like desert.

    Personal Identity
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.The objection assumes persons deserve reward and punishment depending on the moral character of their actions.
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    • 2.Denying desert wholesale leads to moral nihilism, which the Buddha's middle path rejects.
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    • 3.A more promising denial is that there are ultimately no persons to bear moral properties like desert.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Desert-based moral responsibility requires not merely conventional persons but a diachronic subject who is the same entity that deliberated, acted, and is now held accountable.
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    • 2.Buddhist 'conventional persons' are functional aggregates lacking the numerical identity over time that grounds the normative link between past action and present desert.
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    • 3.Dissolving persons to resolve the desert problem eliminates the very subject for whom karmic soteriological liberation is supposed to be beneficial, generating a parallel paradox.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Parfit's reductionism shows that eliminating persons in favor of continuity relations does not dissolve desert but transforms it: overlapping psychological connections still ground degree-sensitive responsibility.
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    • 2.If psychological continuity grounds karma across lives without a transmigrating self, then interrupted or branching continuity chains produce indeterminate desert attributions that the Buddhist account cannot adjudicate.
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    • 3.A theory that cannot adjudicate edge cases of fission or psychological discontinuity fails as a general account of moral responsibility, not merely as a response to the specific transmigration objection.
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    Topics

    Moral ResponsibilityPersonal Identity

    Key Terms

    Desert (philosophical)(as used in ethics)
    What someone morally deserves or is entitled to based on their actions—like deserving praise for good behavior or punishment for wrongdoing.
    Transmigrating self(as used in metaphysics and philosophy of mind)
    The belief that some unchanging part of you (your soul or consciousness) moves from one body to another across different lifetimes.
    Ultimately real(as used in metaphysics and ontology)
    Truly existing as a fundamental thing in the world, rather than being something constructed or dependent on other things.
    karma(Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy)
    Collective mental actions of all beings that produce and shape the experienced world.
    moral properties(Disputed between non-cognitivists (who deny or remain silent on their existence) and their critics)
    Properties such as badness, goodness, or evil that events or states of affairs may possess, and in virtue of which those events are bad, good, or evil
    objection(as a scientific critique)
    A logical problem or reason why something might not work or be true. Einstein found what he thought was a flaw in Weyl's theory.

    Connections

    3 topics

    Modality & Possibility2 linkedAnnihilation1 linkedJustice & Punishment1 linked

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    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: buddha
    View source passageHide passage
    This excursus into what the Buddha meant by karma may help us see how his middle path strategy could be used to reply to the objection to non-self from rebirth. That objection was that the reward and punishment generated by karma across lives could never be deserved in the absence of a transmigrating self. The middle path strategy generally involves locating and rejecting an assumption shared by a pair of extreme views. In this case the views will be (1) that the person in the later life deserve
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    A more promising denial is that there are ultimately no persons to bear moral pr...A theory that cannot adjudicate edge cases of fission or psychological discontin...Any two existing things must be either identical or distinct, so if two persons ...Buddhist 'conventional persons' are functional aggregates lacking the numerical ...
    +7 moreShow less
    Denying desert wholesale leads to moral nihilism, which the Buddha's middle path...Desert-based moral responsibility requires not merely conventional persons but a...Dissolving persons to resolve the desert problem eliminates the very subject for...If psychological continuity grounds karma across lives without a transmigrating ...Parfit's reductionism shows that eliminating persons in favor of continuity rela...The Buddha asserts that the earlier and later person are neither the same nor di...The objection assumes persons deserve reward and punishment depending on the mor...

    Similar

    A more promising denial is that there are ultimately no persons to bea...80%The virtuous actions (karma) of beings belong to conventional, changin...75%Denying that persons deserve reward and punishment is not a viable mid...75%There are no desert-entailing differences between moral agents.75%
    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit