On What Matters

Abstract

Abstract The Buddhist no-self and no-person revisionary metaphysics aims to produce a better structure that is motivated by the normative goal of eliminating, or at least reducing, suffering. The revised structure, in turn, entails a major reconsideration of our ordinary everyday person-related concerns and practices and interpersonal attitudes, such as moral responsibility, praise and blame, compensation, and social treatment. This chapter compares Vasubandhu’s and Parfit’s stance on persons. Although Parfit flirts with eliminativism about persons, he stops short of defending it because of his implicit commitment to avoiding a wholesale revision of our actual person-related practices. Contemporary philosophers, following Parfit, assume that the cost of a wholesale revision of our ordinary practices is too high. This chapter explores the extent to which we must alter and perhaps discard some of our ordinary person-related practices and normative commitments in light of the revisionary Abhidharma metaphysics.