[Buddha-l] Non attached & mindful culinary triumphalism?

[Dan Lusthaus]

A polemical soliloquy that seems rhetorically compelling, but a counter case 
could be made with the same sort arguments.

The argument *for* acknowledging malum in se (bad in itself) would run 
something like: while some people certainly mess around (adultery, incest), 
all societies ban illicit sexual relations. They may fine tune their 
definition of incest (are first cousins on or off limits? Second cousins?), 
or be more or less tolerant of types of adultery, but all insist that "Thou 
shalt not (unless...)..." It is in the nature of human culture to forbid 
such relations (though their enforcement and degree and style of disapproval 
may vary, just as their taste in foods may vary -- nonetheless all eat).

Richard commits the same fallacy that undergrads make when first presented 
with Mencius' theory usually expressed (in English) as "Human Nature is 
originally good." (Mencius is one of the early, great virtue ethicists.) 
That fallacy is to misconstrue what is meant by nature. Mencius never 
suggests that he means "nature" means "happens automatically." He never 
contends that we all *automatically* do good. Rather his claim is that we 
have the capacity for goodness, which, if it is nurtured, cultivated and 
allowed to grow unhindered, will develop into a full fledged "virtue" (de).

For Mencius, as a dedicated Confucian, the primary incipient virtues are 
humankind-ness (ren), justice [ethical balance between needs and obligations 
of the individual vs needs and obligations to the groun] (yi), etiquette 
(li), and the ability to determine the difference between right and wrong 
(zhi). In incipient form these are observable, respectively, in everyone as 
follows:

A feeling of commiseration (the bambi reflex)
a sense of approval or disapproval (of the actions of others)
a feeling of respect, reverence, adulation (misplaced perhaps, by 
incipients, on sports and celebrity 'heroes')
a basic sense of fairness (e.g., children know when they are being blamed 
unfairly).

These incipient forms don't guarantee that the full blown virtues they are 
indications of will fully blossom on their ownautomatically. They require 
cultivation, and can be hindered or even devastated. Water will tend to go 
downward 'naturally', but it can be made to go up by damming it (repression) 
or slapping it (subjecting it to violence).

In short, that human "nature" is "good" doesn't mean people automatically 
will do the right thing in all times and in all places. That the DNA of 
two-thirds of the children in the English village, the majority, indicated 
no adultery, is significant.

It is attractive to imagine that the human situation is a blank slate 
capable of endless manipulation by choice -- gives social engineers the 
illusion that they can create anything. "Biology is not destiny" has given 
way to more respect for and ackowledgement of "biological clocks," and so 
on.

And, no, Andy, it's not immediately translatable into "universals". All 
healthy humans have the capacity to laugh, but we don't laugh at the same 
thing (and some of us are funnier than others). Some cultures treasure 
humor, others suppress it (cf. The Name of the Rose). Laughter is neither a 
universal, nor a mere subjective particular happenstance, and there are many 
types of laughs. Language, since it only functions with samanya-laksana 
(generalized universalistic classes), keeps giving the illusion that the 
variety of things that can be gathered under a word are items in a "class." 
It's a linguistic trick, worth resisting from allowing it to settle in as a 
mental trick. "Available to everyone" is not the same as "ontological 
universal." But a capacity that all possess does indicate something in se.

Dan