Buddhist No-Self, the Person Convention, and the Metaphysics of Moral Practice: Is Hayashi's Emergentist Account of Vasubandhu's Ontology of Persons Explanatorily Self-Defeating?

Abstract

Offered here is a critique of Hayashi's (2016) account of the Buddhist view of persons as emergent epiphenomena. It is argued that ethical agency is an ineliminable part of a fundamental action-theoretic ontology of our normative moral practices. So, if ethical agency grounds our moral practices and persons ground ethical agency, an account of persons as non-epiphenomenal emergents is required.