Euthanasia: Buddhist principles

A response to Damien Keown's Suicide, assisted suicide and euthanasia: a Buddhist perspective.

In his article, Keown articulates what I see as a basically valid reading of the implications of the texts of the Pali Canon on the issues at hand. I particularly like his formulation, 'to deny death and cling to life is wrong, but equally wrong is to deny life and seek death.' As the aging Arahat Sariputta says in the TheragMhaw. 1002-03: I do not long for death; I do not long for life; I shal...

17 Buddhist Bioethics

Describing anything as ‘Buddhist’, including in this case a distinctively Buddhist bioethics, is fundamentally problematic from both a historic and Buddhist point of view. Historically, the Buddhist tradition has evolved in dozens of countries for 2500 years, with no one tradition having clear doctrinal authority over the others. Internally, even if a common Buddhist ethics was implicit in the ...

Portraits of Buddhist Women

Journal of Buddhist Ethics

I argue that central Buddhist tenets and meditation methodology support a view of free will similar to Harry Frankfurt’s optimistic view and contrary to Galen Strawson’s pessimistic view. For Frankfurt, free will involves a relationship between actions, volitions, and “metavolitions” (volitions about volitions): simplifying greatly, volitional actions are free if the agent approves of them. For...

THE CONUNDRUM OF EUTHANASIA