Review of Charles Goodman, Consequences of Compassion: An Interpretation and Defense of Buddhist Ethics

Abstract

To appreciate this book, one must understand what audience it is intended for, the audience that will find this book useful and illuminating. Working primarily as a religious studies scholar and a Buddhist critical and constructive thinker who often addresses herself to Buddhist audiences, I looked forward to reading a book designed to make Western audiences more familiar with Buddhist thought. This is a project in which I am keenly interested and which I often undertake in my own work. However, I was surprised by the extensive command of technical Western professional philosophical terminology required to fully appreciate and evaluate this book, which makes me wonder how effective this book will be in making Buddhist ethics more generally accessible to Western commentators. In particular, I was sometimes puzzled by Goodman’s main thesis—that Buddhist ethics (taken as a whole) is best interpreted as a form of the ethical theory that Western professional ethicists call consequentialism, with perhaps some tendencies toward virtue ethics, but that Buddhist ethics most definitely is not a form of deontology. In my view, being able to correctly pigeonhole Buddhist ethics in terms of Western categories, especially categories as arcane as those used by professional ethicists, may not be the most effective way to foster a clear or accurate understanding of Buddhist ethics, except among professional philosophers to whom these arguments and characterizations would be interesting and important. For those whose primary concern is to gain a clear and comprehensive understanding of Buddhist ethics, probably Goodman’s book is not the best choice, nor was it written as a primer on Buddhist ethics. Goodman is definitely quite proBuddhist in his orientation and is eager to make the case to Western ethicists that Buddhism has sophisticated ethical theories, may solve certain ethical problems better than Western ethics, and contains a set of ethical teachings and insights that SOPHIA (2010) 49:311–313 DOI 10.1007/s11841-010-0176-6